Flaming Water, Frozen Earth
by MariaRoseSina
Summary: A serious Star Wars/Shingeki no Kyojin crossover! The Rebellion is besieged on all sides by the Galactic Empire, but its recent victories have given the Alliance new hope and resolve. Armin Arlert is a flight leader in Green Squadron, the Scouting Corps' elite snowspeeder strike group. Mostly Armin-centric, but there will be significant POV chapters with other characters.
1. Flaming Water, Frozen Earth: Chapter 1

**Flaming Water, Frozen Earth**

**Chapter One**

-DOCUMENT START-

INFORMATION AVAILABLE FOR PUBLIC DISCLOSURE:

DOCUMENT#: FVX45897

CENTRAL GALACTIC LIBRARY, CORUSCANT

We, soldiers of the Rebel Alliance, in the name of the free beings of the galaxy, solemnly vow:

To fight and oppose the Galactic Empire and its forces, by any and all means at our disposal;

To refuse any Imperial law contrary to the rights of free beings;

To bring about the destruction of the Galactic Empire and the restoration of the Republic;

To make forever free all beings in the galaxy.

To these ends, we pledge our property, our honor, and our lives.

**-Military Oath of Allegiance to the Alliance to Restore the Republic**

-END OF DOCUMENT—

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Armin Artlet had visited many worlds.

Some were full of paradise and promise—vibrant with life, temperate and resource-rich, hospitable to colonists from countless scattered corners of the galaxy. In his twenty years of life, Armin had grown to know a few of these quite well. Aldaraan, Corellia, Yavin IV, and Chandrila had been lush, green worlds, nourished by sunlight's touch and the kiss of soft rain. Even Dantooine had possessed a certain wild charm, its vast verdant plains whispering of adventure and unexplored beauty.

Other planets were unquestionably hells—black and red with volcanism, shrouded by toxic or acidic fume, whipped by raging winds and gaseous storms, or crushed beneath the titanic weight of their own atmospheres. Untold billions of exoplanets drifted in the cold of space, utterly dead and silent, home to nothing but rock, vacuum, and ultraviolet rays. Millions more existed only as gas giants, emitting deadly radiation pulses, their colorful clouds concealing violent turbulent forces that would shred a space vessel into fragments to be melted and vaporized by the pressures deeper within.

Armin Artlet had visited many worlds, but this one... this world was the first of its kind that he'd ever seen.

On days like this, when the barometric pressure was high and the air too cold to hold liquid moisture, the sky was clear and cloudless, baby blue and bright with the rays of the distant sun. Reflected light blazed across the expanse of snow and ice below. Soft blue shadows, delicate as watercolours, delineated the topography of ridges, while exposed rock slopes protruded like black scars from the sea of white.

Most of the year, however, when the frozen earth was hidden in low clouds and driving snow, their snowspeeders would patrol the clear skies high above the surface. Their repulsorlifts churning the floating wisps into vortexes behind them, they would ascend. Reaching cruising height, they flew across mountain ranges that poked like islands from a roiling ocean of grey and white. Meanwhile, six thousand feet below them, the blizzard was a deathtrap, capable of freezing a well-eqipped human solid with just five minutes of exposure.

At altitude, however, Hoth was a paradise, a wonderland.

As he peered through the windscreen of his modified Incom T-47 airspeeder down at the clouds below, Armin reflected that this planet looked like it was sleeping, buried in rest beneath the blankets of blue ice.

Here, on this untamed world, the Rebel Alliance for the Restoration of the Republic had raised its battered standard to rally once more the scattered galactic forces of good and hope.

With difficulty, Armin returned to the task at hand. He tore his eyes from the beautiful panorama around him, checked his place in their two-speeder flight formation, made a minute adjustment of the control yoke, and finally glanced intently at the scanner screens.

Nothing. Just the same twin dots twenty klicks east where Green Seven and Green Eight were searching. Not a single life signature to be seen on the ground.

A female voice from behind Armin broke through the whine of the T-47's twin engines.

"Armin, you think it's time to try again?" asked Flight Officer Mina Carolina from the rear gunner's seat. He heard the rustle of her flight harness as she turned in her seat to look at him over her shoulder. "We've covered ten klicks."

"Yeah…" Armin nodded, inwardly pessimistic.

There was no reason for their search pattern to be so broad. They were surveying an area well beyond the distance a tauntaun could have traveled from Echo Base in thirty hours, and the possibility that the missing soldiers could have made it this far was remote to ludicrously unlikely. Rogue Squadron was already sweeping the more plausible inner perimeter, yet Armin doubted that even they would find anything. Anything alive, that was. Still, General Rieekan and Leia Organa had been insistent.

Double-checking to verify that his transponder was set to broadcast using the standard Alliance military comm codes, Armin leaned forward slightly over his control yoke and repeated the same message that he'd been sending for the last three hours.

"Commander Luke Skywalker, this is Green Five. Do you copy? Over."

"I repeat, Commander Luke Skywalker, this is Green Five. Do you copy? Over."

Pause. No response.

"Captain Han Solo, this is Green Five. Do you copy? Over."

"Repeat, Captain Han Solo, this is Green Five of the Scouting Corps Tactical Air Squadron. Do you copy? Over."

A long minute passed with nothing but the high-pitched roar of the engines filling Armin's ears. Below them, ridgeline after tall ridgeline passed, barren and lifeless.

"Do you think they're still alive?" Mina asked hesitantly.

Armin shrugged before remembering that she couldn't see the gesture from the back seat.

"I'm not sure," he replied. He sighed, "I don't think it's very likely." He gripped the pilot's yoke tightly with his gloves, trying not to think about the reaction back at Echo Base if the Alliance's brightest hope, the hero of Yavin IV, was brought back as a frozen corpse.

Still… It was Commander Skywalker out there, Armin reminded himself, and if anybody could survive a night blizzard on Hoth… Couldn't Jedi place themselves into a protective hibernation state? He'd read about it in a datanet book once.

In front of him, the scanner readouts flickered as Mina ran through the sequence of relevant protocols, searching for comm chatter, electromagnetic signatures, life forms, metal objects, and infrared bodies. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

They had reached the boundary of the search zone. Hauling sideways on the control yoke, Armin pushed the snowspeeder into a moderate bank, starting the 180-degree turn that would place them on the next leg of the search-and-rescue mission path. Inside the cockpit, the sun's rays sent shadows sliding across the instrument panels with the speeder's turn. Simultaneously, a kaleidoscope of bright glare flashed across the interior of the transparisteel canopy. Armin enjoyed the light show, but frowned nonetheless. He would need to mention this to the maintenance crews back at base; something seemed to be causing the windscreen's anti-glare compound to deteriorate.

They flew onwards. Every ten kilometers, Armin broadcast the same set of search messages before waiting patiently for a response. Mina continued monitoring the sensor screens.

She cleared her throat. "Two o' clock. Tauntaun herd at eight klicks. Looks like six… uh, seven individuals, adults with a couple juveniles."

Simultaneously, Armin's comm channel lit up with an excited voice. "Green Five, this is Green Six! Green Five, this is Green Six! I think we've found them, repeat, I think we've found them!"

Armin instinctively turned his head to starboard, squinting at the horizon where a sharp black dot soared over the snowy crags. A moment later, his instrument panels flickered as Hannah and Franz transmitted their sensor data to him. He looked down and furrowed his brow.

"Green Six," he replied, "re-check your biosignature readings. That's just a group of tauntauns, over."

Hannah's voice sounded embarrassed. "Damn, you're right Armin… sorry about that…"

Armin heard Mina chuckle behind him as she reassured their wingmen, "Don't worry about it, Six, you just have to process the signal through all of the sensor modes and cross-check them. Keep up the good work!"

Armin refocused his attention on the sky ahead, making a minor course correction.

All things considered, the new recruits were learning fast.

Flight school training had been drastically shortened following their retreat from Yavin IV and the subsequent increases in both pilot losses and new blood. The squadron's newest fliers now made up almost a third of its total strength, and Commander Erwin had reorganized the unit to pair each rookie aircrew with a seasoned set of wingmen. A good training measure, but a poor organizational structure for combat. For that matter, Armin, Mina, and most of his fellow pilots had less than two years of experience.

Still, this was the Alliance, after all, ragtag, destitute, and improvisational to its core. By relative standards, theirs was an elite unit.

At least recruitment had ballooned in the last few years. Armin himself had joined in the first huge wave of fresh inductees following the destruction of Aldaraan. The shocking destruction of the Death Star shortly thereafter had completely electrified the idealists of the galaxy, flooding resistance cells across the stars with enlistees, funds, and messages of support.

_If what is good in sentient beings across the universe has not yet been destroyed even now, then evil shall never conquer._

The familiar quotation from one of Armin's favorite extranet novels rose to the surface of his mind, warm and hopeful.

At that precise moment, Armin's communications headset came alive.

"Green Five, this is Squadron Command. Green Five, this is Squadron Command."

He jumped in his seat in surprise as he recognized the voice of Colonel Brzenska. Her voice was trembling with uncharacteristic excitement, and Armin focused immediately on her words.

"We've found them! I repeat, the search is over. Rogue Group has located Commander Skywalker and Captain Solo, and a transport team is already en route. Green Five, your flight is ordered to discontinue search operations. Return to base immediately. Please acknowledge, over."

Armin felt his face break into a relieved smile. So they had survived! Against all possible odds, they had endured a long night at the mercy of unimaginable blizzard conditions. The good news was truly as unexpected as it was welcome.

He rushed to respond. "Acknowledged, Squadron Command. Should we move to assist with the recovery? Over."

"Negative," came Rico Brzenska's answer. "Rogue Squadron is on station to oversee the rescue. All Scouting Corps squadrons are to return to base. Good work. Squadron Command out."

Armin rapidly relayed the information and their new orders to the rest of his flight of four aircraft. From their scattered positions across eighty square kilometers of open air, the snowspeeders converged on him to reform. Hannah and Franz were the first to settle into position aft of their starboard beam. A minute or so later, Green Eight took up an identical station behind Armin's other shoulder. Armin turned briefly to look, and caught sight of Connie's grin behind his windscreen as he flashed a thumbs-up. Mikasa and Eren's speeder was still distant, but Eren was already subjecting their ears to whoops and cheers of exuberance at the news of the operation's success.

Mina had already entered a flight path for their return to Echo Base, and Armin swung the T-47 onto the new bearing. Ahead and below him, the sun caught a snow-capped peak and ignited the summit in a majestic flash of gold. He could see the faint shadow of their speeder racing across the ground, followed by two more as Connie and Hannah maneuvered their own craft to follow his.

They made the return flight to the outer perimeter in high spirits. Connie, Sasha, and Mina, soon joined by Eren after he and Mikasa rejoined the formation, rapidly abandoned all pretense of proper comm protocol, exchanging jokes and barbs, threatening to blow one another out of the sky, and loudly discussing their predictions for what the base canteen would serve for dinner later that evening. Sasha was particularly vocal despite Connie and Mina's teasing, having missed both breakfast and lunch so far today since their departure at first light five hours earlier.

Despite his rank as flight commander, Armin couldn't bring himself to enforce decorum, and found himself chucking at the antics of his wingmen. The Alliance had always had a loose, informal military culture anyway, hadn't it?

Besides, they were at the edge of the galaxy out here. Who was out here anyway to intercept their communications?

Soon, their flight of four snowspeeders neared the outermost defense sector surrounding Echo Base. Below them, the icy landscape appeared empty, devoid of weapon emplacements or stationary turrets. Invisible to the eye, a ring of advanced sensor stations lay buried in the ice, placed at intervals all around the central base in a circle that stretched one hundred kilometers in diameter. Perimeter Maria, the defense staff committee had designated it.

Armin reached out with his left hand to pull back on the throttle, slowing the T-47 from its cruising speed. Outside his cockpit, he could hear a chorus of high-frequency whines as his wingmen followed suit. Keying his transmitter to boost the IFF signal emitted by his T-47's onboard beacon, Armin opened a hailing comm channel to Echo Base.

"Control, this is Green Five, 57th Scouting Corps Tactical Air Squadron. My flight is approaching Echo Base from the southwest. Bearing: zero-two-two degrees. Range: 52.3 klicks out and closing. Requesting landing clearance and an approach vector for four T-47 combat airspeeders, over."

Behind him, Armin could hear the clicking of switches as Mina went through their pre-landing checklist, opening the engine cowlings, activating their landing lights, and running a systems assessment.

"Green Five, this is Control. Please authenticate, over."

Armin broke out into a grin. Was that who he thought it was? Only one voice could be so outwardly dispassionate, subtly edged with dry sarcasm and a hint of a mocking tone.

"Is that you Annie? This is Armin. I'm taking my flight back in from the search—could you give us a hangar assignment?" Their snowspeeder lurched as Armin pushed it into a slow descent.

"Negative, Green Five," came the response. Annie's voice was firm. "Permission to land denied. Remain at present altitude and transmit your authentication code immediately or you will be fired upon."

There were gasps of surprise from the other pilots in Armin's flight as alarms lit up in their cockpits, announcing that they were now being targeted by multiple laser and concussion missile batteries. Armin's own eyes widened in shock, and he immediately pulled the T-47 back onto a level flight path. "Annie!? What in the name of the Force are you doing!?"

There was no question about it. Annie was clearly enjoying herself as she replied, "Imperial Intelligence can create a passable artificial voice protocol from a five-second sample of voice chatter. A flawless replication is possible with a fifteen-second comm sample. Please authenticate for security purposes, over."

She had even left the antiaircraft batteries' targeting modules on. With sweat building inside his flight gloves and his insides churning with mingled embarrassment and indignation, Armin relented and spoke clearly into his transmitter.

"Sabaac-Delta-Seven-Mynock-Two-Four-Kilo. Please confirm, over."

Armin heard Mina giggle behind him, and he flushed.

The missile lock-on warning tone died, and alarm lights winked out across the instrument panel. Armin, realizing that he'd been holding his breath in apprehension, exhaled in a sigh of relief. Wondering at the ridiculousness of the situation, he tapped his fingers of his left hand against the throttle controls impatiently as he waited for Annie's response.

"Authentication confirmed. You are cleared to land at Hangar 6. Proceed northeast on your current bearing for twenty two klicks, then turn onto three-two-five for final approach, over." Her tone was businesslike, as though nothing had happened.

"Thanks, Annie… Green Five out," Armin said wearily as he signed off. He pulled back on the throttle controls, then eased the vehicle back into a shallow dive.

Mina was chuckling to herself again as she began her assigned preparations for landing. Shaking his head bemusedly, Armin asked her, "Do you know what that was all about, Mina?"

"Oh…" she replied mid-giggle, "I'll tell you later…"

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her helmet shake from side to side, and he thought he heard her mutter something about boys. Wondering what that meant, Armin returned his gaze to their flight path.

Slowly, the ground rose up towards their four snowspeeders as they lost altitude. Descending to eight hundred feet, they soared over the plains that stretched in all directions around the base. Here, the winds had sculpted the snow into a smooth blanket of soft shadows and sun-bleached white. Armin could see thick clouds of snowflakes roaring just above the ground, flung by gusts across the landscape below. The terrain was flat, a prairie of snowdrifts, unbroken by hills, ice sheets, or rock.

A perfect killing field.

Perimeter Rose. As they reached the far end of the open plain, their sensors began picking up signals from the three concentric rings of fortified defenses that faced outwards to protect the main base. From the cockpit, Armin could pick out the squat Golan Arms DF.9 laser turrets sitting just behind the zigzagging lines of trenches. Behind them stood the antiquated P-Tower anti-vehicle batteries, their dish-shaped silhouettes aimed across the exposed ground.

"Armin?" Mina spoke up from the rear-facing seat. "We've reached the nav point Annie gave us."

Armin made the necessary adjustment, and the snowspeeder's nose dipped and swung to the left onto their new bearing. On their right, Hannah was late to respond to the course change. Her speeder receded into the distance for several seconds, still flying on their previous heading, before suddenly careening into a sharp left bank. Her engines' exhaust glowing as she accelerated to rejoin the formation, Hannah apologized profusely over the comm for the lapse.

They flew onwards together, now just a dozen or so kilometers out from the base itself.

Above them, the dull yellow sun had slipped behind a layer of high-altitude clouds. The snowscape assumed a shade of steel gray, a tone of twilight replacing the midday glow. Simultaneously, Armin spotted the dark specks far ahead that marked the various hangar entrances of Echo Base, their armored doors built into the range of low hills.

On a sudden whim, Armin switched his transmitter to the squadron frequency. "Green Six? This is Green Five. Could you move to take our place in formation and lead the rest of the flight in for landing?"

"Roger that, Five. Why?"

"Just going to make a flyby of the base and enjoy the scenery for a bit."

"Okay." Hannah was already maneuvering ahead of them to assume the lead position.

"See you at chow time, Armin!" Eren called out over the comm as he and Mikasa overtook Armin's snowspeeder on the left.

Armin's speeder left the formation, climbing into a gradual turn that would take them on a wide circle around Echo Base.

Armin turned slightly in his seat. "Do you mind, Mina?"

"No, not at all," she replied. "Beautiful, isn't it?"

Indeed it was. Hundreds of miles away across the plain, mountain crags rose towards the clouds like a distant cityscape—a majestic backdrop to the swirling sea of snow blowing across the open plain. Bright blades of sunlight slashed downwards where the high clouds were thin, highlighting broad patches of frozen ground far away. The sun itself, hidden though it was, had surrounded itself with a fuzzy yellow halo as it sat at the apex of the sky amidst a haze of cirrus clouds.

Armin felt a smile growing on his face as they turned and soared over the great hangar entrances, over hills and valleys dotted with sensor arrays, over tauntaun patrols, over the afternoon work parties laboring on the slopes to clear snow from the previous night's blizzard. On the southern slopes, the base's KDY Planet Defender ion cannon pointed towards the sky, casting a long shadow against the snow. A short distance away hovered a newly-arrived Galofree-class transport, its landing lights burning brightly as it offloaded fresh supplies. Up ahead, four tiny dots—a combat air patrol of four snowspeeders—slowly moved across the horizon.

Here, in one of the most inhospitable habitable environments the galaxy had to offer, the Rebellion had built a home. Facing this death sentence of a planet, they prepared to defiantly confront a death sentence imposed on them by the mightiest interstellar power that had ever existed.

Yet, in spite of their threadbare odds of success, in spite of the harsh conditions in which their resistance operated, in spite of the peril associated with armed resistance against the galactic regime, and in spite of the prospect of fighting a war that might stretch for centuries, their movement was growing. Ship by ship, recruit by recruit. News arrived every few days of fresh defections from navies across the Outer Rim, of new armed revolts upon world after world. The Alliance might have been beaten back, forced to give ground, but the furious hammerblows of the Empire themselves served as a testament to their rebellion's increasing strength.

And soon, the time for the Alliance's counterattack would come.

With one last look through his transparisteel canopy at Hoth's world of eternal winter, Armin turned their T-47 towards the hangar, towards home.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

**That's right, guys, this is a Star Wars crossover with Shingeki no Kyojin! I'll say no more and just let you guys read on!**

**For the most part, I've tried to base all AoT characters on their trainee academy personalities, with modifications to account for their in-universe personal histories. Our favorite Star Wars personalities will make their appearance very soon, so stay tuned!**

**If you liked this chapter/story, please do check out my other story: Just What Needs to be Thrown Aside?**

** s/9994699/1/Just-What-Needs-To-Be-Thrown-Aside**

**For those of you already reading Just What Needs to be Thrown Aside? do keep in mind that it has NOT been abandoned AT ALL. I'm going to work on these two stories simultaneously, and I have plenty of ideas for both!**

**And as always, thanks so much for reading! I hope you enjoy this new story, and please favorite and follow!**


	2. Flaming Water, Frozen Earth: Chapter 2

**Flaming Water, Frozen Earth**

**Chapter Two**

-DOCUMENT START-

INFORMATION AVAILABLE FOR PUBLIC DISCLOSURE:

DOCUMENT#: KKY22310

ALLIANCE GRAND MEMORIAL LIBRARY, CORUSCANT

**SQUADRON PERSONELL ROSTER: 57th Scouting Corps Tactical Air Squadron.**

**12 Incom Corporation T-47-11 Combat Airspeeders (winterized).**

**24 pilot-gunners (human).**

**FLIGHT ONE:**

**GREEN LEADER**: Cmdr. Erwin Smith (CO) (pilot) / Cpt. Mike Zacharius (gunner)

**GREEN TWO: **Cpt. Levi (pilot) / Lt. Cmdr. Hanji Zoë (XO) (gunner)

**GREEN THREE: **Cpt. Erd Jinn (pilot) / Cpt. Gunther Schultz (gunner)

**GREEN FOUR: **Flt. Lt. Petra Ral (pilot) / Flt. Lt. Auruo Bossard (gunner)

**FLIGHT TWO:**

**GREEN FIVE: **Flt. Lt. Armin Arlert (pilot) / Flt. Officer Mina Carolina (gunner)

**GREEN SIX: **Flt. Officer Hannah Hermann (pilot) / Flt. Officer Franz Müller (gunner)

**GREEN SEVEN: **Flt. Lt. Mikasa Ackerman (pilot) / Flt. Officer Eren Jeager (gunner)

**GREEN EIGHT: **Flt. Officer Connie Springer (pilot) / Flt. Officer Sasha Braus (gunner)

**FLIGHT THREE:**

**GREEN NINE: **Flt. Lt. Jean Kirstien (pilot) / Flt. Officer Marco Bott (gunner)

**GREEN TEN: **Flt. Officer Ymir (pilot) / Flt. Officer Christa Lenz (gunner)

**GREEN ELEVEN: **Flt. Lt. Reiner Braun (pilot) / Flt. Officer Bertholt Hoover (gunner)

**GREEN TWELVE: **Flt. Officer Thomas Wagner (pilot) / Flt. Officer Dazz Zusak (gunner)

-END OF DOCUMENT—

Captain Solo had visited many worlds.

Shivering at the sudden draft as the door leading to the hanger opened, Han Solo reflected that the frozen corridors of Echo Base almost reminded him of a particular ice palace resort back on Corellia. If it weren't, of course, for the absence of wealthy patrons, golden waitstaff droids, sabaac tables, or even decent interior lighting.

A group of ground crew technicians approached the door, wheeling a hovercart piled with power supply units, and Han stepped aside to let them pass. One of the mechanics, a Bothan, grinned at him as they maneuvered their cart past. "Thanks Captain Solo. Good to see the planet hasn't made an icicle out of you."

"Not yet," Han replied with a half-smirk.

Well, at least he was beginning to forget the stench of disemboweled tauntaun.

Shooting a smuggler's alert, instinctive glance around the vast hangar, Han stepped forward into the sea of deliberate activity swirling around the crowd of transports, fighters, and warships. Now that Luke was in stable condition, it was time to attend to a matter that had been neglected for far too long.

As he walked along a row of parked Y-wing bombers in the direction of the _Milennium Falcon_'s berth, a number of the pilots and soldiers looked up and waved in his direction. A sudden stirring of unease materialized deep inside him, and Han elected to nod back at the gathering before increasing his pace across the hangar floor. He looked determinedly at the floor as he passed other groups of ground crewmen walking in the other direction. These rebels were always so friendly, so quick to laugh and smile. Unlike the suspicious squint of a veteran smuggler or a fugitive's defensive glare, their eyes shone bright with idealism. They innocently believed in their revolution, and furthermore, they even saw him as their brother. Damn them.

They weren't making it any easier for him to leave.

Han passed a Galofree-class transport, its underside lit by the flare of a dozen fusion cutters. A day before Luke's unlucky wampa encounter, he'd given the lead technician in charge of repairs a word of advice about hull plate replacement. A week ago, he'd found himself in a conversation with a squad of Alliance commandos, exchanging views on optimal blaster rifle power settings for defeating stormtrooper armor. Three years had passed since the destruction of the Death Star over Yavin. During that time, he'd eaten, slept, fought, and flown side-by-side with the Alliance soldiers and pilots in a dozen battles, all while looking over his shoulder for Jabba's bounty hunters and assassins. He'd stuck around with the Alliance far longer than he'd ever intended to, hadn't he? What else could a penniless starship captain with a price on his head hope to do?

At that moment, Han's ears picked up a new, familiar set of footsteps behind him. A paw smelling of oil, coolant, and fur landed heavily on his shoulder as Chewbacca growled a greeting. The Wookie slowed to match his stride.

"Hey Chewie,"

They walked side-by-side down the ranks of starships as they had in a thousand spaceports across the galaxy.

Chewbacca was midway through describing a prioritized list of repairs to Han when the two of them rounded a utility vehicle and came face-to-face with the angular bow of the _Milennium Falcon_. There it sat, dirty and battle-scarred as ever, the glow of the hangar lights reflected dully by its white-grey plating. Partly due to Chewbacca's emphatic insistence, the old Corellian freighter had been placed in an area largely to itself to avoid the risk of collision with other craft as they came and went. At any rate, Alliance mechanics had learned to give her a wide berth after a few of them had learned, thankfully without injury, just how protective Chewie was of the ship. Sometimes, Han had to wonder just who his Wookie companion had sworn a life-debt to—him, or the _Falcon?_

Faulty maintenance of the _Falcon_ had once caused her to suffer a near-catastrophic drive failure mid-jump. Ever since, Chewbacca had vowed that only he and Han would ever be allowed to service the freighter. On two occasions, Han had saved hapless, well-meaning spaceport crews only by physically throwing himself in front of the enraged Wookie. As for the most recent time that a spaceport dock worker had attempted to perform repairs on the ship, Chewbacca had torn three arms off the guilty alien. Only a hefty bribe and the fact that the victim's species was capable of rapid regeneration had saved the two of them from life sentences.

Han's first thought was that he'd never learn to understand why he always felt an immense upwelling of affection every time he laid his eyes on the freighter. His second thought was that the starboard-most landing strut looked worn, and ought to be serviced. His third thought, however, was interrupted by a charged bellow of rage that froze his blood and sent his hand immediately to the holster at his hip. That was when Han saw the woman standing underneath the _Falcon_, turning in shock as she lowered the tool she'd been using on the ship's underside.

Spinning, Han saw Chewbacca charging forward, letting out another battle yell as he rushed at the intruder with fangs bared. Cries of warning rang out around them as other ground crew members realized what was happening. In front of Chewie, a repair droid failed to get out of the way in time and was sent flying across the hangar floor by several hundred pounds of Wookie flesh.

Han suddenly became aware of the cool polymer of his blaster pistol's grip underneath his palm, and he froze.

Han was reacting far too late to intervene. His own blaster was useless—he'd long ago removed the stun setting in order to boost its power and range. Worse, its touch reminded him of a terrible fact that he'd learned long ago.

A Wookie's nervous system was incredibly—sometimes fatally—sensitive to the powerful neurological shock delivered by a stunning blaster bolt.

Chewbacca's target was a waiflike girl with blond hair, short and slender even by human standards. Her eyes were wide with surprise as she stared at the Wookie charging her, and her own hand had moved to the small blaster at her hip.

An overwhelming fear for his copilot's safety overrode Han's indecision, and he screamed, "Chewie! Cool it! LEAVE HER ALONE!" Desperately hoping that this was all just a nightmare, he yanked his blaster pistol from its holster and wondered if he dared risk a shot aimed at his companion's legs.

Across the floor, Han could see Alliance personnel sprinting towards them with horrified expressions. Their mouths opened and closed, but their yells were hopelessly drowned out as Chewbacca continued to roar as he ran, promising death and endless pain for the human that had dared to touch his ship.

The girl technician's face was white with terror, and she seemed rooted helplessly to the ground at the sight of the massive alien charging her.

At the last moment, Han lifted his pistol and fired a shot into the ceiling. It had no effect; his copilot either ignored the sound or didn't hear it. Out of options, Han leveled the blaster and prayed to the Force that he wasn't about to kill his best friend.

Chewbacca closed to striking distance and lunged.

In that instant, the girl finally moved. Gone was the stationary victim. Suddenly, the human was dropping to avoid Chewbacca's left-pawed swipe. In a flash, she cut to the right—out of the Wookie's path. Her left arm rose automatically to deflect the surprised Wookie's instinctive attempted grasp. Simultaneously, the girl pivoted, then threw the entirety of her not-very-substantial weight into her opponent's back and hip. Chewbacca grunted in astonishment as he twisted, carried forward by his own weight and momentum to crash, sprawling, upon the ground.

In the time it took Han's jaw to drop, the mysterious technician had bounded several paces away before turning again to face her assailant. Chewbacca clambered onto one knee and raised his head only to find himself staring into the snout of the girl's snub-nosed blaster.

The weapon's barrel wasn't even quivering.

Han shakily lowered and holstered his own pistol, suddenly aware that the hangar had fallen silent just as instantaneously as it had erupted into chaos moments before. He could feel his heart pounding beneath his vest, familiar battle adrenaline still surging through his bloodstream. The faint smell of ozone and expended blaster gas hung in the air, lingering from the single shot he had fired. Dozens of Alliance mechanics and supply workers stood motionlessly around them, some with their blasters drawn, a few with comlinks half-raised to their lips. Half of them were still tense and ready for action, watching Chewbacca nervously. The other half gaped, some of them mouthing silently in shock to themselves. Dumbfounded at what he had just witnessed, Han joined them in staring openly at the woman who had just floored an adult male Wookie.

At a second glance, it was clear that she wasn't a tech at all. Instead of an assortment of repair tools, her belt was fitted with a bizarre blend of tech devices and practical infantry equipment: comlinks, datapad, vibroblade, blaster holster, power packs, a broad-spectrum comm scrambler/descrambler, and what looked like a silenced slugthrower. Han would have tagged her as a common smuggler or information thief were it not for her clothing. Her uniform was an unusual dark blue design that Han wasn't familiar with, and the patch on her shoulder bore the horned yatta-beast insignia of the base's Interior Security Brigade.

Even had she been wearing a mechanic's garb, her combat experience was obvious. The girl's stance was far too clean—her feet spread for balance, her grip on her blaster perfect. Most of all, however, her eyes betrayed her identity as a fighter. Steel blue and focused behind her fringe of blonde hair, they spoke of hardened martial training.

Chewbacca had risen to his feet. He too, cocked his head at the strange female, emitting a low curious growl. From the look of it, his rage had been completely replaced by total bewilderment.

Han couldn't repress a chuckle as he turned to his embarrassed copilot.

"You really need to work on first impressions, fuzzball."

Around them, the crowd continued to watch the scene, though most of those that remained seemed progressively more convinced that the situation was on the road to a peaceful resolution. A supply officer was speaking into his comlink to one side, cancelling his prior request for a tactical reaction squad. An orange-clad pilot called out to the woman. "You allright, ma'am?"

Chewbacca's adversary responded silently by straightening from her firing stance and returning her blaster to her belt. Slouching slightly where she stood, she pushed a lock of hair behind her ear.

Han frowned, deciding that her nonchalant attitude irritated him. Turning to the girl, he stuck a finger at her "You're lucky Chewie didn't put you on the medbay's priority list for limb replacements. What in the galaxy were you doing to my ship, anyway?"

"I noticed something dripping from an access panel in your hull," she answered. "I thought to take a look."

Han inspected the ventral surface of the _Falcon_, and sure enough, a steady drip of water was seeping from the panel below the ship's galley. Damn plumbing, he thought. There had to be a leak in the freshwater pipes again. For that matter, water shouldn't even be leaking from the seal around that access point. It looked like he and Chewie would have to run a hull integrity check again.

What a piece of junk indeed.

"Yeah? Thanks." Han replied guardedly, "Next time, _send_ someone to tell one of us instead of risking death by Wookie."

The girl shrugged.

Chewie growled, giving the would-be meddler a stern warning for the future.

New sets of footsteps clattered against the ground. Han looked behind him to observe a group of newcomers just arriving at the scene. A squad of five rebel soldiers was slowing to a halt and shouldering their weapons. They glanced between him and Chewbacca, looking somewhat disappointed that they had missed the show.

At the same time, an Alliance pilot in full flight uniform was suddenly standing at Han's shoulder. He clutched his helmet beneath one arm with the same cocky ease as any of the base's other fighter aces. Yet, in contrast to the mature confidence of his posture, the pilot's blond hair was cut like a child's and tangled from hours spent beneath flight headgear. The human flier's expression was earnest and friendly.

"Everything all right here, Captain?" the pilot asked with a broad smile.

"Ask Chewie," Han quipped. Chewbacca rumbled a guarded greeting.

Han gave the newcomer a rapid evaluation. That accent, beyond any doubt, indicated a homeworld somewhere within the Galactic Core. Flight Lieutenant's insignia on both shoulders and checkerboard patches on the sides of the flier's helmet identified him as a veteran of at least one major campaign. Short of stature and clean-shaven, the youth couldn't be older than twenty-two at most by Han's estimation.

"X-wing pilot?"

"Yessir. 57th Tac Air. We were out looking for you this morning." The youth beamed and offered his hand. "I'm Armin Arlert."

Han accepted the handshake. "Pleasure, flight lieutenant."

The two of them watched casually as the newly arrived soldiers interviewed Chewbacca and the woman from the Interior Security Brigade in turn. Seemingly satisfied that the risk of violence had abated, the squad leader gave orders to post a permanent guard detail around the ship, earning a hum of approval from the Wookie. When the sergeant turned to ask that the girl apologize, however, he was met with narrowed eyes that seemed to dare him to repeat the request.

Han chuckled. The girl's expression had led him to think of another young woman who could deliver a similar icy glare at the drop of a coin. Leia was also well capable of taking care of herself in a fight too, as he well knew, though Han conceded that he doubted that she would be able to fend off an enraged Wookie.

Well, that was what a rogue like him was around for, right?

His heart, buoyed by the princess's image in his mind, suddenly constricted as he remembered again that he was leaving her too. He clenched his hands into fists.

At his side, the pilot frowned, noticing the smuggler captain's sudden tension. Han hurriedly crossed his arms to hide his earlier gesture, and the two of them stood side by side amidst an uncomfortable silence.

In a transparent attempt to defuse the atmosphere, Armin Arlert nodded in the direction of the _Millennium Falcon_. "She's a beautiful ship." He smiled nervously. "You should hear some of the stories some of the other pilots have been telling about what you and Chewbacca have accomplished."

Han snorted. "I've heard most of them," he said dismissively. "You shouldn't believe everything people tell you."

"I think a few of them have been confirmed by quite reliable sources," Arlert replied. "Rescuing the Princess from the Death Star…"

Han shrugged semi-modestly, and didn't mention the fact that he'd had to be convinced to attempt the rescue in the first place.

Unaware of the truth, Arlert was gazing at Han with open admiration.

In many ways, this kid was representative of the Alliance military as a whole—young and eager to fight, yet mature and aware of the magnitude of the herculean struggle they faced. It didn't seem to matter how many Star Destroyers and stormtrooper armies the Emperor commissioned… the rebels would fight against the odds all the same. Idealistic and selfless, they would rather die than live in a galaxy that was anything but free.

Han had, however, just come across at least one Alliance soldier that didn't seem to fall into the same personality category. He frowned, and nodded towards the girl standing a short distance away observing them dispassionately.

"That woman… she just…" he began, swallowing as the memory of the incident with Chewie replayed once again in his mind. Finding his voice again, he finally asked Armin Arlert "Who the hell is she?"

The pilot laughed, and his blue eyes flickered over to settle on his fellow soldier. "That's Annie. She's a field agent with our counterintelligence unit."

Han gave her a third glance out of the corner of his eye. Young, probably around Arlert's age. Pretty, though quite plain in any fair comparison with the princess, at least in Han's opinion. More than anything, though, she seemed to radiate an attitude of disdainful independence.

"What's that, a Commando unit?"

"Espionage," Arlert corrected him, then added softly, "She's ex-Imperial Intelligence."

Han raised an eyebrow at that. Well that explained a lot, particularly the attitude. "_Ex-Imperial Intelligence?_"

Armin Arlert noticed the look in his eyes and replied hastily, "most of Alliance Intelligence is ex-Imperial. Otherwise, we wouldn't have a chance at understanding how to secure our communications from them or how to prevent spies from infiltrating us." The pilot frowned. "There have been betrayals… but we don't have much of a choice. As for Annie, she's on our side for certain, anyway."

"Yeah, well…" Han growled, unsatisfied. "I've heard stories of Intelligence officers being ordered to kill one another to establish cover identities."

The youth nodded. Something in Arlert's eyes, however, indicated that he trusted his deadly comrade deeply. After a moment's pause, the pilot took a deep breath and stated, "She's genuinely a part of the Alliance. Her father is a sector head of espionage in the Imperial Navy."

Han didn't have to have the implications clarified further for him.

A number of the Alliance's rarest and most valuable recruits were members of the galactic elite—generally young, often highly-placed and well-connected—led by compassion for the Alliance cause to throw away all of that power and wealth, to risk their lives by placing themselves and their secret knowledge at the rebels' disposal. The consequences of defection were grave. The poor girl likely had a death price on her head in the millions of credits, and would undoubtedly never see her family again in her lifetime.

Who were these people, who dared to give up everything for a fool's chance of a rebellion, for some dim hope of founding a new, republican, egalitarian galactic order…?

The hubbub of voices, machinery, and power tools had arisen once more, returning the hangar to its natural atmosphere of industrious activity. Annie was leaving the scene now, walking away slowly without a backward glance. Her measured pace as she passed pairs and trios of Echo Base personnel made it seem as though nothing had occurred at all, as though she were just another humble, unremarkable soldier in the service of the Rebel Alliance.

"The Empire doesn't forget or forgive." There was a strange sadness in Arlert's expression as he stared blankly down the row of starships after her. Suddenly, the youth turned to Han and looked the older man directly in the eye.

"You know you can't go just go back to the way things were before—to being an unknown smuggler again."

He knew they were leaving? Han started in surprise, caught off guard by the revelation that word of his imminent departure had spread. Unprepared, he found himself unable to respond.

His shock must have registered in his eyes. Armin Arlert shook his head slightly, as though rebuking himself for having gone too far.

For an instant, neither of them said a word. Then, with an unspoken implication that he understood and respected Han's decision, the pilot extended his hand a second time and gave the smuggler a small smile. "I'm glad I could introduce myself before you took off. Thank you for everything that you've done, Captain Solo. We'll miss having you around."

"Thanks." They shook hands, and Han added sincerely, "Watch your six out there, kid."

The youth's blond head nodded.

Han recognized a familiar nervous haste in the posture of the pilot's shoulders as Flight Lieutenant Armin Arlert hurried off in the direction the girl had gone.

So that's how it was, Han thought to himself. He smirked. Kid probably didn't even know it himself yet.

Well, good luck to him.

Han watched the orange flight suit vanish into the sea of activity swirling around the hangar floor. He stood there a moment longer, his mouth thinned, and then he turned back towards Chewbacca and the _Millenium Falcon_.

A decade later, Chewbacca would find himself bested in hand-to-hand combat for the second time in his life by a certain alien assassin in the skies above a planet called Honoghr. In the following days on that strange world, he would recall that cold morning in the main hangar of Echo Base and the puny human female who had neutralized his headlong rush without batting an eye. Stretching his long limbs, staring up at an unfamiliar sky, and frowning at the aches and pains from a dozen past battles, he would think back across the long years and wonder to himself, briefly, what her fate had been.

OOOOO

"Annie, you're being a really mischievous person today, aren't you?"

Armin had caught up with Annie just as she was passing from the main hangar to the supply depot. Ducking around a cargo vehicle piled high with foodstuff containers, he ran the last couple of steps until he was walking beside her.

"Armin." She acknowledged him without so much as a nod or a glance. Usually, Annie's voice remained in a deadpan monotone, filled with seeming disinterest. When she had just spoken, however, her speech had slipped briefly into a mode almost musical in pitch, almost as though his name was a fragment of the lyrics to some song.

Registering the odd tone, Armin wondered briefly if she was still mocking him after the incident earlier that morning. Well, he was glad someone had enjoyed the joke she'd pulled—those had been _real _laser and concussion missile batteries, for galaxy's sake. Half-seriously, Armin decided that Annie probably needed a hobby. Ideally, a hobby other than thrashing sparring droids, other soldiers, and full-grown Wookies into submission with her bare hands.

They walked past a freshly-arrived array of ground sensor equipment. Armin watched Annie's eyes briefly scan the devices and saw her brow furrow as she inspected them with an expert's gaze.

Simultaneously, Annie cleared her throat. "I'm surprised. You haven't reported me yet for arming twenty sets of antiaircraft weapons without authorization."

"Well… I… You—"Armin sputtered. "—I knew you didn't mean it at the time."

"I did mean it." Annie lifted her head from the sensor shipment. "I was bored. And it sure didn't sound like you thought I wasn't serious." He could barely hear her voice over the whine of servomotors filling the equipment depot.

Armin flushed at the memory and felt heat rise to the surface of his cheeks despite the chilly base atmosphere. "I could recommend you some good extranet novels if you're so bored…" he offered.

Annie narrowed her eyes at him in suspicion, and Armin promptly shelved that suggestion.

"You're not supposed to access the extranet without direct permission," Annie reminded him. Armin further remembered that she had the authority to ground him from flying as punishment for the infraction, and he bitterly reflected that she might well be bored enough to be amused by ordering an investigation into his datapad usage patterns.

Annie shrugged, however, and Armin interpreted the gesture to mean that she wouldn't pursue his breach of data discipline any further.

They moved from the supply bay into one of the transit corridors themselves, headed in the general direction of the central base. Armin still needed to stow his flight suit in the pilot ready room. Annie, he supposed, was bound for the canteen for her customary post-duty cup of caf.

Unlike the cavernous, crowded hangar and cargo bays, the halls of Echo Base were dark and claustrophobic. Droids and base personnel crowded the passages, shuffling awkwardly past one another through the regular bottlenecks at doors and corners. Up ahead, a contingent of rebel freighter crewmen late for their ship's scheduled departure jogged towards them in the opposite direction, calling out to be let through. Annie stepped aside first, and Armin squeezed himself next to her against the side of the corridor to make room for the group. The icy surface at his back dug painfully into his flight suit, its chilly touch a sharp contrast to the faint warmth where Annie's shoulder was briefly pressed into the side of his arm. The burly spacefarers barreled past, one of them turning with a shout of thanks. As the sound of footsteps against the durasteel floor plating trailed off into the distance, Annie was the first to push herself away from the wall and resume navigating through the crowd. Armin transferred his flight helmet to his other arm and followed, muttering an apology as he cut through a pair of infantry officers.

As they stepped into the hallway's dim lighting, they passed a tall, white-furred Talz soldier headed in the opposite direction, and Armin suddenly remembered why he had wanted to catch up to her in the first place. "I saw what happened earlier at the _Millenium Falcon_," he began. "You know, you might end up being almost as famous as Captain Solo once people find out that you sent Chewbacca to the ground in hand-to-hand fighting."

Annie broke into a rare ghost of a smile. "That kind of trick only works once. I had the element of surprise because he underestimated me."

"Did they teach you that technique in Intelligence School?" Armin asked.

Annie's eyes flashed briefly, and he feared for an instant that she was about to respond by giving him the silent treatment, or worse. To his surprise, however, she relented and answered.

"We were informed as trainees that rebel groups and warlords liked to look for powerful alien brutes as enforcers and soldiers. When they taught us unarmed fighting, they focused specifically on ways to surprise stronger nonhuman species."

Annie's face hardened as she spoke, and Armin realized that she was unconsciously slipping into the persona she cultivated for sparring and marksmanship practice. Behind her blue eyes, he could see her visualizing martial techniques—the traps and escapes, the footwork, the evasions and deflections.

Once again, Armin was left to wonder at Annie's past.

Annie had only joined the Alliance military a short time before Armin's arrival, but rumors had already begun spreading by then about how the first soldier who had tried patting her on the shoulder had ended up in sickbay for a week, or how she had bested the crew of an entire frigate in a blaster pistol competition. Indeed, she had cultivated quite the reputation at Echo Base for her martial skill, her enigmatic character, and for her tendency to cause trouble every once in a while.

There was also the matter of her background. He shuddered. Armin felt cold suddenly, and the frigid halls of Echo Base were not entirely to blame.

Imperial Intelligence was infamous for a training regime that dehumanized and indoctrinated its recruits to the breaking point, stripping them of their natural inhibitions and moral conscience in order to mold trainees into loyal, unquestioning servants of the Empire. The ideal graduate was a blank slate, a mask without any remaining shred of the person they had once been. Of the many other Intelligence agents that found their way into the Alliance military, many encountered difficulties socializing or adopting a normal lifestyle, and most favored a reclusive existence, interacting only with their immediate superiors and colleagues within the rebel movement's counterintelligence and espionage departments. That said, it was quite plain to Armin that Annie's personality had very much survived her time in Imperial service. Her dark sense of humor, her cynicism, and her fierce pride in her own capabilities were clearly marked by her past, but her experiences, whatever they had been, seemed to have left the core of her personal identity unharmed. Annie worked well enough with others, and she appeared to be at home with the everyday pulse of base life. Sure, she was generally quiet, and preferred observation to participation in conversations and social activities—but these were her own choices, not the remnants of old training.

Like the tunnels of an anthill, the interior of Echo Base snaked erratically through the rock of the ridge it had been carved into. Sections of passageways narrowed without warning, or transitioned into steep inclines as they walked deeper into the complex. To the left, an open set of double doors led into the naval officer's lounge, and Armin briefly caught a glimpse of the famed starfighter ace Wedge Antilles, dressed in a casual uniform, sprawled across a soft chair and conversing with two of Rogue Squadron's other senior members. Spotting Armin's orange pilot's suit in the hallway outside, the veteran pilot turned to face the door and gave him a small wave, an expression of vague recognition behind his eyes.

Armin waved back hurriedly, then they were past the brightly lit doorway, marching further down the passage.

"Have you thought at all about what you'd do after all of this, Annie?" Armin chose that moment to ask. "After you leave the military?"

Annie frowned. She inclined her head ever so slightly in Armin's direction as she replied, sending a faint puff of condensation into the air in front of her as the moisture on her breath cooled. "After all of this?"

Armin nodded.

He was taken aback by the biting question she aimed at him in return. "Are you really so hopeless, Armin?" she began. "Do you really think that, at the end of all this fighting, there is a future where a normal life is possible for us?"

Armin's eyes widened, then he frowned. "What do you mean? Of course—don't trillions and trillions of individuals live normal lives across the galaxy?"

This time, Annie turned her head completely and gave Armin a long, evaluatory look.

"Armin, this rebellion will never be over within our lifetimes," she said, sighing. She returned her gaze to the passageway before them. "And if it is, then the end of the war will have come about because the Empire will have defeated us."

A vision materialized in Armin's mind of wrecked Rebel fleets and shattered bases, of a cackling Emperor announcing the end of the upstart rebellion to thunderous applause and the roar of fireworks from the balcony of the Galactic Senate. Tendrils of fear shivered through his body as he realized that such a future was disconcertingly easy to imagine.

"Annie, does that mean you don't even think that we can win?"

Suddenly, Annie stopped, and Armin realized that they had reached the door to the base canteen. The smell of cooked vegetables, meats, and caf emanated past the threshold, causing Armin's stomach to stir impatiently. Instead of entering, however, Annie lifted her chin and rested her eyes on the Alliance starbird crest painted above the entryway.

"Does it even matter what I think?" she retorted. "The Death Star was nothing. The Alliance hasn't even managed to permanently liberate one world with a population of over ten billion. Instead, the Empire has driven us back from system after system, crushing uprisings in weeks and months..." Armin opened his mouth to respond, but she cut him off, adding, "If we're going to win the civil war in the end, why are we hiding in a place like this, on the edge of the galaxy, hoping that we'll survive a few more years because we've gone somewhere too cold and too distant to be noticed?"

Some of the base personnel eating at the tables closest to the door raised their heads upon hearing what Annie was saying. When Armin noticed them, they quickly averted their glance, staring back down at plates of food as though unaware of the conversation. Two of the women at the closest table exchanged looks briefly, one of them squinting at Annie out of the corner of her eye.

Armin chose too to pretend that nobody was listening as he took his chance to reply. "It's obvious that we're outmatched," he protested, gesturing at their surroundings with a gloved hand. Snaking bundles of power conduits, light fixtures that sputtered and glowed dimly, and ice-shrouded walls were encompassed by the sweep of his arm. "I think we all know that it's not going to be an easy war."

"We're weak and short on supplies, and we can't fight a straight battle, but at the same time the Empire is overstretched and growing more unpopular every year. The rebel movement is more than just the Alliance, more than just us soldiers… The harder the Imperial military tries to stamp out freedoms, the more difficult they make things for themselves. They can hurt us, but they can't kill us all…" Armin paused. "—and that means that one day, we'll end them eventually."

Annie rolled her eyes. She took a step backwards to lean against the doorframe. Crossing her arms, a wave of golden hair fell across her forehead as she lowered her head. "Okay. So the Empire stamps out the rebellion in corner after corner of the galaxy, only for it to burst into flame somewhere new. Then, the war never ends… not for decades, maybe centuries even…"

For a moment, her words trailed off. Briefly, Annie raised her head, meeting Armin's eyes with her own. "If that's the case, how many millions and billions of lives are you willing to sacrifice before you decide that the rebellion isn't worth it anymore?"

As a shiver traveled down Armin's spine, Annie looked back down to the ground. "Hundreds of billions of people are dead, Armin. Some were just bystanders in the wrong place during our battles, others were killed in the millions in retaliation as punishment for rebellions… all because a group of hopeless idealists like us are willing to fight a war for the sake of a galactic democracy that may not even work."

"…might not even work?" Armin echoed weakly. "Annie… are you saying what I—"

Annie cut him off, crossing her arms. "The galaxy is a dark place." Her expression darkened as she frowned, staring moodily at the dirty floor at Armin's feet. "Do you think that anyone will even remember your name a hundred years from now?"

Armin felt a fire growing inside him, an anger at Annie's words that threatened to burst out with the force of a grenade. He suddenly realized that his fists were clenched, the material of his pilot's gloves creased tightly by the force of his fingers. His words trembled as he finally brought himself to reply. "It doesn't matter if we're forgotten. It doesn't even matter if we lose." Armin took a deep breath. "Annie—what matters is that on the day that the Empire reached out to strangle the freedom of hundreds of trillions of people, somebody fought to save it."

Out of the corner of his eye, Armin could see some of their fellow rebels seated around the mess hall tables nodding at his words, their faces set in agreement. The guard standing at the other side of the doorway seemed to be standing taller and straighter, his blaster rifle held at a prouder, more defiant angle to his body.

"Right now, a million beings are being vibroknifed in back alleys, or getting executed for crimes they didn't commit, or starving to death with their entire families." Annie's eyes were suddenly soft and unfocused as she spoke, and her stare seemed to penetrate the floor plating and the rock beneath, through the other side of the planet and into the vast, infinite space beyond. Her voice, too, was surprisingly gentle. "It's admirable to want to do something, to try and make the galaxy a better place… but when a single person's efforts just get swallowed up and forgotten, is it so wrong to be self-centered and settle for what you have?"

"Is it such a bad thing, to live a selfish life?" she finished.

Armin looked at her. Her dark gray uniform jacket fit her as though made for her. Her equipment belt sat across her hips at just the right angle for a rapid blaster draw. Navy blue trousers thrust into her combat boots completed the picture of a deadly Alliance operative, an efficient, seasoned officer and soldier.

When Armin spoke again, his voice had lost its earlier tremor. "Annie…It's not such a bad thing. But, if that's what you think, why did you join the Alliance at all then?"

Annie's head shot up. This time, their eyes met as if by accident, and Armin was stunned as, for a moment, he witnessed waves of anger and hurt crashing in the sea of her blue pupils. Gone was the cynicism, the guarded glare, and Armin looked for an instant into the heart of a soul just as lost and haunted by ghosts as his own.

She must have recognized something in turn, and she widened her own eyes briefly before looking away across the banks of tables filling the canteen. When Armin looked again, her face had outwardly reassumed its normal expression, yet something seemed to be ever so slightly different in the pose of her neck, in the lines of her lips.

"I was curious."

Armin was surprised by her words until he remembered that he had asked her a question.

Annie crossed her arms, "I wondered what kind of people would give up everything for nothing."

Her voice became so quiet that even Armin had to focus in order to hear her at all. "They showed us holovids of live, real interrogations in training. We could all see that these were real people, no different from us… they cried out for their parents and begged—but there was something else…"

For a long time, Annie said nothing more. A minute must have passed before she continued softly, "something else led them to resist… to say nothing for days no matter what methods the agents used… it took weeks before…" He saw her swallow.

Finally, Annie said, "When I defected, I wanted many things, but one of the things I wanted was to meet these people, and to find out if I was at all like them."

Armin thought back to his own path, the sequence of events over the months and years that had brought him to this remote part of the galaxy, placing him in this uniform with a lieutenant's pips on his breast. He remembered the crisis that had led him to first question his passive tolerance of the galactic regime. He remembered the dark, tormented night when he'd made the decision at last, the months of careful searching, avoiding the lethal Imperial traps for would-be Alliance recruits, the merciless weeks-long rebel investigation into his own background upon his initial recruitment. He remembered the pilot training program, the accidents that had claimed friends and comrades. He remembered his first mission, his first flight through a storm of starfighters and laser fire, surviving more by luck than due to any skill or training. It passed through his mind in a blur, leaving him feeling far older than his twenty years.

"I know what you mean," he finally replied, and he meant it.

She looked back to him briefly, and Armin was forced to wonder if he had just imagined another ghostlike smile.

"See you around, Armin." Annie gave him a tiny wave, then stepped into the cafeteria towards the caf machine.

The old memories that Annie's words had conjured up, once summoned, could not be so easily dismissed. Lost in thought, Armin walked the remainder of his journey in a daze, barely registering the groups of soldiers, support personnel, staff administrators he passed. He was faintly aware of passing the whine of engines being tested in the maintenance halls, then the muffled blasts from behind the heavy doors leading to the blaster rifle and pistol range. Finally, he reached his destination. Armin smiled emptily at the greetings of his squadron mates, excusing himself as he punched the door controls on the other side of the junior pilot officer's common area. He stepped into the warmth of the pilot's ready room, his feet leading him by memory until he faced his own name, inscribed across the face of his equipment locker.

ARMIN ARLERT

FLIGHT LIEUTENANT 1ST CLASS

57 SQN (SCTAS)

As he grasped the edge of the locker door to open it, Armin's thumb briefly touched the grooves of a fourth line of text engraved just below the first three. Even though he had seen the sign hundreds of times, Armin glanced for a long moment at that final set of characters and briefly felt the familiar stirrings of loss and sorrow etch fresh cuts into his heart. Older memories, half-forgotten, floating to the surface of his mind, Armin determinedly averted his eyes from the words and swung the locker completely open, hiding the plaque from sight.

The final line read:

SHIGANSHIMA, ALDARAAN


	3. Flaming Water, Frozen Earth: Chapter 3

**Flaming Water, Frozen Earth**

**Chapter Three**

-DOCUMENT START-

INFORMATION AVAILABLE FOR PUBLIC DISCLOSURE:

DOCUMENT#: SKN14890

CENTRAL GALACTIC LIBRARY, CORUSCANT

**THE ALLIANCE STARBIRD**

Immortalized by its use by the **Alliance to Restore the Republic** during the **Galactic Civil War**, **THE ALLIANCE STARBIRD** was adopted in the Year 33 of the Galactic Standard Calendar by the Alliance at the time of its founding in order to serve as the official symbol of the united rebel resistance opposing the rule of the **Galactic Empire** under **Emperor Palpatine**.

Drawn in the form of a crest, the Starbird depicts a stylized rising **phoenix** lifting its wings in flight, a metaphor for the Alliance's birth amidst the ashes of **The Old Republic**. The **origin** of the symbol is unclear, with theories ranging from its evolution from a mythological Aldaraanian rune **(note)** to its original identity as the family crest of one of the Alliance's lesser-known founding members. The original design in crimson is considered most emblematic of the Rebel Alliance, though renditions in alternative colors such as blue, gold, and white on a field of blue or red were also commonly used both during and after the conflict. Soldiers and pilots of the Alliance regularly painted the symbol upon combat vehicles and flight helmets or incorporated it into their battle standards with varying degrees of fidelity.

Following its adoption, the Alliance Starbird rapidly achieved instant recognition across the stars, capturing the imagination of billions of dissidents, activists, and resistance groups across known space. To many, its sharp aesthetic contrast to the harsh angularity of the **Seal of the Galactic Empire** served as a fitting illustration to the ideals separating the two warring factions. Iconic and memorable, the Starbird transcended its role as a mere crest of the Rebel Alliance, embodying and inspiring a collective spirit of sacrifice, valor, perseverance, and hope with a single work of artistic genius. Perhaps, more so than any other symbol before or after it, the Starbird is destined to be forever remembered in the annals of the history of the galaxy, long after all other emblems have been forgotten amidst the countless millennia of future time.

**-THE 822nd ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA, VOL 57 (MILITARY AFFAIRS AND GALACTIC POLITICS)**

-END OF DOCUMENT—

OOOOO

The next days passed unremarkably, much as the previous months had. They patrolled the base perimeter daily, sweeping the skies in groups of four amidst all but the harshest weather. At home, the never-ending work of expanding and renovating Echo Base continued, with construction crews swarming this hall or that one to add new rooms and transform recent, temporary work into more permanent architecture.

Here, on the edge of the known galaxy, they found it easy to lose track of the passage of time. In the skies above Hoth, the subtle changes in temperature and weather patterns that marked the transition between seasons were invisible to the eye, leaving the land locked in seemingly eternal winter. Indoors, the glare of stale artificial lighting and the featureless underground caverns concealed even the cycle of day and night. They lived their lives by their chronometers, waking, eating, reporting to duty, and retiring at the appointed hours as though they were droids.

But as regimented and featureless as their Echo Base service was, the young pilots and soldiers enjoyed ample free time to themselves. In the mess hall, training centers, and squadron lounge, they could devote their off hours to recreation, harmless pranks, and idle conversation. At times, Armin would smile at the thought that they had managed to bring an atmosphere of life and lightheartedness to the surface of a planet that had never before known human habitation.

But, even as laughs rippled around the squadron pilots' lounge in response to an offhand comment by Connie, Armin looked to the far wall across the room and was reminded of the grim, ever-present galactic backdrop to their banter. More so than the military uniforms they were wearing or the spartan if comfortable furniture around them, the posters and makeshift memorials fixed to the walls reminded Armin that this was no cantina, young workers club, or student common area.

Remember Aldaraan. The words stretched across the length of the room, printed in thin red lettering below the Alliance Starbird on a long white banner.

Below the banner hung several memorial plaques. Trinkets and mementos from past campaigns sat in the center small tables placed against the wall. A poster with the squadron's crest—a crossed pair of blue-and-white wings—graced the place of honor overlooking the rest of the lounge.

Ilse Langnar. A pilot from before Armin's time. Her name and several lines written in remembrance had been etched in gold across a panel scavenged from an X-wing's transparisteel canopy. While docking her damaged starfighter following a routine deep-space raid on Imperial shipping, her ship had suddenly lost power just short of the hangar doors, diving and crashing into the cruiser's hull.

The collection of items that the squadron had accumulated over time told their own story of the unit's history since its foundation. The assemblage included a TIE fighter pilot's helmet, recovered from the ruins of a destroyed asteroid base, a toy Star Destroyer, obtained during a raid on a shipyard planet, an ornate holochess set, liberated from an Imperial governor's luxury space yacht, a sandstone block from one of the abandoned pyramids on Yavin IV, and the most recent addition—a tauntaun skull to commemorate their arrival on Hoth.

Armin chuckled as he scrutinized the pale tauntaun skull. He turned to look at where Sasha was sitting upside-down in her armchair, legs draped over the back of the seat as she squinted at a datapad. Remembering how Bertholt's face had gone white when she had first brought the artifact into the lounge, Armin permitted himself a smile at the memory of how Sasha, Connie, and Eren had easily managed to convince him that Sasha had personally hunted down and consumed the tauntaun in question.

The culprits and the gullible victim in question were all present at the moment. Connie was pouring himself a third cup of caf from the machine in the corner of the lounge. Bertholt, exhausted from his patrol that day, was struggling not to doze off next to Thomas and Marco on the sofa.

Much of the rest of the squadron was scattered around the room. Dazz, Jean, and Reiner occupied the other long sofa, engaged in a heated argument over who the most attractive bachelorette on base was. As Armin watched, Dazz declared that Princess Leia was the most beautiful woman that he had ever laid eyes upon, immediately evoking furious, red-faced reactions from both Jean and Reiner.

"You can't be serious, Dazz—have you even _seen_ Christa?"

"Forget Christa! You must have been born blind if you think the princess is better-looking than Mikasa!"

Armin's eyes widened at Jean's outburst, but to his surprise, the expected reaction from Eren did not materialize. Searching the room for his childhood friend, he found Eren off to one side, to all appearances oblivious to the conversation taking place. Petra, Erd, Auruo, and Gunther sat around a table playing a four-way multiplayer datapad game of some sort. Hanji and Eren stood behind them with their eyes fixed on the small screens. Watching over the players' shoulders, the two of them shook their heads in unison just as Auruo let out a crow of victory and punched a fist into the air.

Only nine of the squadron's twenty-four members were missing. Commander Erwin, Captain Levi, and Captain Zacharius had been called to participate in a meeting. Hannah and Franz had withdrawn elsewhere to do Hannah-and-Franz things. Lastly, Christa, Ymir, Mina, and Mikasa had left together for the blaster range to determine who the second-best female marksman in the squadron was, having grudgingly been forced to concede over the past year that they would never compete with Sasha for the top title.

Looking around at the fourteen other pilots filling the room, Armin reflected on how close he had become with those around him since their transfer to Hoth. One year. One year had passed since the squadron had fought in combat last, since they had last raised glasses to the memory of comrades recently lost. Following the arrival of the new recruits three months ago, this constituted the longest length of time that Armin could remember in which the squadron roster had not changed.

"Hey Arlert!"

Armin jumped. The shout across the room had originated from Auruo, of all people.

Seeing that he had Armin's attention, the veteran chuckled before asking, "Is it true that Eren failed his pilot qualification exam three times before he finally passed?"

"Who told you that!?" Eren bellowed, causing Sasha to drop her datapad in surprise.

Auruo eased back in his chair and grinned at the younger pilot's indignation. "Kirstein did, which is why I didn't believe him at first."

"He did," Armin admitted, shooting an apologetic glance at his friend before hastily adding, "but it wasn't his fault—his nav software was completely miscalibrated during his first three attempts."

Reiner spoke up, corroborating Armin's statement. "That's right. Eren passed with top marks once they repaired his X-wing."

"Jean, what are you trying to pull by telling everyone about that anyway!?" Eren exclaimed, rounding on Jean with a deadly glare.

Jean shrugged, his lips parting in a mischievous smile. "Well Auruo was just wondering why you haven't managed to score a kill in combat yet."

"Well, I'd like to see anyone score a kill with Mikasa as their wingmate," Thomas commented to general agreement.

"Jean, _you_ only bagged that TIE fighter over Rodia because Bertholt knocked out its engines…" Eren countered, bristling.

As Jean and Eren began trading barbs across the length of the room, Armin caught Reiner's eye and shook his head ruefully.

Privately, Armin found himself wondering yet again at the strangeness of their childish rivalry. How had the two of them ended up at such odds with one another when there was every reason for them to have become good friends? In truth, Jean and Eren shared far more in common with one another than they cared to admit—confidence, stubbornness, outgoing personalities, initiative, fierce loyalty to their friends and comrades, excellent piloting abilities, even the same boyish sense of humor.

Armin had never understood the pettiness of the conflicts that ignited from time to time between his fellow squadron members. Why did Captain Levi have to be so harshly critical of Mikasa's rare mistakes when she generally excelled in her duties to such an extent that she made perfection look normal and expected? There was no reason that Armin could think of for Ymir and Reiner to be unable to be on speaking terms, nor did Mikasa have any cause to be as terse and dismissive towards Sasha as she sometimes was. Was it so difficult for them to look past their meaningless disagreements and acknowledge the admirable qualities in one another?

At that moment, a gentle knock drew their attention to the ready room door.

"Password?" Connie called out jokingly, cutting through Eren and Jean's continued bickering. The rest of the room, however, fell silent and turned to face the entryway with curiosity. They all knew that no fellow squadron member would bother to knock before entering.

The person on the other side of the doors, however, seemed familiar enough with the squadron to know that neither a password nor a passkey were required. The doors hissed open, and the newcomer stepped inside before heading straight for the caf machine.

Connie laughed. "Oh, hey Annie."

As Armin predicted, the story of Annie and Chewbacca's hand-to-hand skirmish had spread throughout the base faster than lightspeed, with the result that Annie had begun seeking refuge in the Scouting Corps squadron lounge to avoid persistent requests by strangers to retell her side of the story.

Sure enough, Annie stepped up to the machine, poured herself a cup of the hot beverage, and leaned against the counter as she took a sip. As always, Armin marveled at how she could march straight into their midst without saying a word only to casually behave as though she'd been there all along.

"We should start charging you an admission fee to come in here," Gunther joked.

Annie ignored the comment.

"I should charge _all_ of you a fee for the privilege of being in my presence," proposed Auruo, guffawing loudly at the looks of deep exasperation that Petra, Gunther, and Erd immediately shot in his direction. Hanji chuckled, then snatched Auruo's datapad from his hands before he could react and swiped him gently across the head with it.

"Hey!" Auruo yelped.

Armin looked back at Annie and suppressed a smile. The way she just stood there, uninterested in all of them, one would think that she had the lounge all to herself. Still, something seemed oddly tense about her today…

"So Annie," Jean began with a yawn. "What have you Intelligence folks been working on these days?"

None of them expected Annie's peculiar reaction to Jean's question. Her eyes suddenly grew round in surprise, and she straightened. Setting her cup on the counter behind her, she exclaimed, "You don't know?"

She surveyed their bewildered faces, her expression suddenly darkening. Seeing that their confusion was genuine, she turned to Jean and explained, "The base is in an uproar. A surface patrol discovered an Imperial probe droid outside Perimeter Rose a couple of hours ago."

Instantly, the room fell into a deadly silence. A heartbeat passed before finally Erd leaned forward and demanded, "Was it transmitting?"

"We intercepted a transmission before it self-destructed," Annie confirmed. "Cryptology has just started working to decode it."

Once again, they sat in silence as the implications of what had happened dawned on them.

Jean looked as though he had turned into a ghost. His face pale and fixed in an eerie smirk, he croaked hoarsely, "Well… that's it then… isn't it?"

The four special operations pilots seated around the table looked the most shocked out of all of them. Their eyes were wide and unfocused as the four veterans stared across the room, their thoughts seemingly light-years away.

Armin's own mind was working furiously, trying to guess at the probability that the base's location had been revealed. Where had the probe been captured? In a way, it didn't matter whether the droid had managed to transmit the news of its discovery or not. The Alliance leadership was guaranteed to play things safe and abandon Echo Base rather than risk everything on the faint hope that the probe had been neutralized in time. But if a droid had been found on the planet's surface, what was the likelihood that Imperial forces were already on the planet?

Suddenly, they became aware of excited chatter and what sounded like a dozen pairs of military boots in the hallway outside. Before anybody could react, the door to the pilot's lounge had hissed open again.

Commander Erwin strode into the room, flanked by Levi and Mike Zacharius. Behind them followed the remaining members of the Scouting Corps squadron. Hannah and Franz ducked into the lounge next, their faces red. Behind them, Mikasa, Ymir, Christa, and Mina filed through the doorway.

Most of the group of newcomers, Armin observed, seemed apprehensive. The Commander, however, looked strangely alive as he walked towards the center of the room. The brooding, quiet squadron leader of the last few weeks was nowhere to be seen, replaced instead by a man with fire in his eyes and steel in his step as he mounted the low platform in the middle of the lounge.

The regular pilots hurriedly set aside their snacks, cups, datapads and saluted their commander. Even Annie pushed herself away from the counter and stood at attention. Sasha, wriggling to extricate herself from her chair, was the last to rise to her feet.

The commander nodded to acknowledge their salute.

"At ease, pilots."

Erwin frowned as he recognized Annie standing to one side, then smiled thinly. "I see. I take it that you have all heard the news, then."

As Levi and Mike took their places at his shoulder, the commander turned to face the rest of the squadron and raised his voice. "Two hours ago, Captain Solo and Chewbacca encountered and destroyed what we believe to have been an Imperial deep-space probe droid about three and a half kilometers northeast of the primary shield generator complex."

This time, there was no reaction to the news. Armin looked around the lounge and saw grim acceptance written across two dozen faces.

"General Rieekan has given the order to prepare the base for evacuation." Erwin continued. "Our squadron is to be deployed along with Rogue Group in direct participation in the base's defense. A battle alert is now in effect. We can expect Imperial forces to arrive in-system in as little as twelve hours."

Erwin paused, making sure that his previous sentence had sunk in.

"A more detailed briefing is scheduled for 0600 hours tomorrow morning in the main hangar. Report fully dressed for flight operations. That is all."

The commander finished speaking. Standing before them, he closed his eyes for a moment and visibly took a deep breath before exhaling as though meditating.

Annie was the first to excuse herself, leaving quietly through the doorway with as little ceremony as she had entered.

So their brief escape from the war had ended, Armin concluded bitterly. Once again, they would return to the nerve-racking cycle of desperate fight and flight—an endless pursuit across the stars that barely kept them one step ahead of the Star Destroyers and their legions of stormtroopers. He supposed that the clemency they had enjoyed had been too merciful to last. The galaxy, it seemed, always found a way of balancing happiness with grief, peace with strife.

He looked around the room. Christa appeared as if she was dreaming. Mikasa and Jean's expressions were fatalistic. Auruo had returned to his seat with a failed wisecrack that elicited only a grunt from Hanji in response. Seeing Mina trying to catch his eye, Armin glanced at her and read the deep worry in her frown.

As the commander stepped down from the raised area at the center of the room, Captain Levi had a final word for them.

"Get some rest, and be prepared to scramble at a moment's notice."

That night, none of them slept a wink.

OOOOO

"Attention base personnel, Imperial ships have entered the lunar perimeter! Prepare for immediate evacuation! All combat troops, report to your defensive stations!"

This was real. General Rieekan's transmission over the base intercom the next morning drove home the grim truth: the long-anticipated nightmare had materialized. The Empire had come.

There was no alert siren, as there had been on Yavin IV. Armin found the absence of an alarm blaring both eerie yet welcome. Instead, the pilots of the Scouting Corps squadron dressed in silence, save for the rustle of clothing and equipment, punctuated by the sound of metal lockers opening and closing. All around him, Armin's friends and squadron-mates bore forced, fixed faces as they dashed to and from their lockers, emptying them of their contents and pulling on their uniforms and equipment. Their expressions all revealed the same battling emotions: acute anxiety, disbelief, grim resignation—all clashing turbulently in their minds amidst their headlong rush in preparation for battle.

They left the locker doors wide open and their off-duty clothing strewn across the floor. Sasha's small holomirror. Mikasa's stuffed bantha toy. Jean's set of watercolor paints. Connie's collection of galactic souvenirs. These trinkets and more, the trappings of the base comforts that they had grown accustomed to, were shoved aside on their shelves and forgotten. Stepping and hopping over the discarded items, not one of them paid the slightest attention to the mess. All of them knew that this would be the last time that any of them would set foot in this room.

They jostled one another, stumbling amidst the confusion. Yet, though the ready room was packed with bodies, it seemed almost as though each pilot stood alone, lost in their own thoughts, solitary even amidst the crush of their fellows.

Mikasa moved as though dreaming, attaching her blaster, vibroknife, comlink, and emergency beacon to her belt with almost mechanical care.

On the other side of Armin's row of lockers, Reiner cursed softly as he dropped his flight helmet on the ready room floor with a clatter. He bent halfway to the ground to retrieve it before he realized that Connie had already picked it up and handed it back towards him.

Yet every so often, someone would seem to suddenly remember that they were standing shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow pilots, and they would break out of their reverie, cracking a joke laced with gallows humor, exchanging muttered fragments of conversation, or in some other small way acknowledging the friend or comrade at their side.

"Hannah, listen to me."

Hannah was shaking as she checked the life support unit sitting on her chest, when Franz reached out placed a hand on her shoulder to reassure her. "We'll make it through this." His voice rang with confidence, but something in his eyes betrayed his own worries.

On the other side of the room, some of the most seasoned veterans of the squadron went about their standard pre-battle rituals. Brow creased with concentration, Hanji was staring at her datapad, tabbing rapidly through the pages of the same Imperial Navy manual on starfighter tactics that she had read front-to-back nineteen times before. Meanwhile, Gunther Schultz solemnly walked between Erd, Auruo, Levi, Erwin, and Petra and shook hands with each of them. Commander Erwin and Mike Zacharius, however, went through their preparations professionally and without fanfare, their faces grim.

For his part, Armin himself had begun to become accustomed to the terrible chaos of the hours and minutes before imminent combat. His fingers weren't trembling as they had been before his first battle, but they still felt cold and numb as he fumbled to close the fastenings of his pilot's harness.

"Hey Armin, are you all right?"

Eren had appeared at Armin's shoulder. The hair above his brow was damp with sweat, but otherwise, Eren Jeager appeared calm and ready. His green eyes, however, were narrowed with concern at his friend.

"I'm fine!" Armin exclaimed, finally managing to clip his insulated flight pants to his equipment belt. "It's just that…"

His voice trailed off. Armin's body was going through the familiar motions, checking the vacuum seals of his suit at the ankles, waist, and wrists, but his mind was racing as it imagined how the upcoming battle would unfold. Finally, he organized his thoughts and spoke, "We've raised the planetary shield… and that forces the Empire to launch a full assault directly on the shield generator itself." He looked up into Eren's face. "They're going to select the one option for an attack that we're not prepared to effectively resist—and we don't have the heavy weapons to stop them."

If the defenses failed to hold, it would be a miracle if they evacuated everyone in time. The most important equipment and personnel would be evacuated on the first transports. That in turn meant that the Alliance soldiers least likely to escape the planet alive were precisely those tasked to defend it—the infantrymen, the pilots, the artillery gunners, and the wounded from all the combat branches.

As if on cue, the base loudspeaker came alive a second time. This time, instead of General Rieekan's gruff, professional tone, the voice that spoke was the fiery bark of General Pixis, the commander of the base defenses at Perimeter Rose.

"Attention all base personnel! Imperial landing forces have been detected inbound at Perimeter Maria. All forces—prepare for ground assault!"

The broadcast ended, and the pilots immediately returned their attention to the task at hand, making their final preparations with redoubled haste. Eren, however, paused for a moment and gave Armin a broad smile. "We'll be fine. The Imperials won't be expecting Commander Skywalker's new tactics. We'll take care of their hovertanks, and our forces on the ground will cut their infantry into ground meat!"

Armin wasn't sure. The rebels' lack of heavy ordnance forced them to rely on a delicate combined-arms force for defense of the base. Any complications—communications jamming, maybe, or the neutralization of any one component of their forces—could compromise the integrity of the entire fortified line… Still, this was their Rebellion, and they had neither asked for nor expected an easy fight. And this was not the time for second thoughts. Armin nodded at his friend and gave him a grin in return.

Christa was the first to leave fully dressed for the hangars. Moments later, Ymir stuffed her comlink, blaster, and her remaining tools into her helmet as though it were a basket, thrust the whole collection under one arm, and raced after her. Commander Erwin and the rest of the Special Operations flight were the next to leave, marching through the ready room door as one. As he passed through the doorway last, Captain Levi turned over one shoulder and hissed, "Hurry up, you brats!"

Sasha followed them out the door, joined a minute later by Reiner and Mina. Then it was Armin's turn. His locker empty, he straightened, feeling his pilot's harness stretch across his chest.

Next to him, Eren was still pulling his flight boots on. Mikasa, looking fully prepared to climb straight into her airspeeder, stood over him impatiently with crossed arms.

"Eren…" she began.

"Just give me a moment!"

Seeing that his childhood friend was still a good deal away from full flight readiness, Armin decided to wait for Eren and Mikasa outside. Before he left, however, he took one last look down the front of his uniform and performed a final check. His harness and seals checked out, as did the blinking lights on his life support unit. His blaster, never once used in anger, sat in its holster at his right hip.

It was a familiar, comfortable uniform—the same flight suit that he had worn since his first mission. Below the tag with his name fastened to the uniform's left breast, he could see the rough threads where his lieutenant's insignia had been sewn over the previous rank badges. A terrible thought occurred to Armin at that moment, and a cold shiver ran through his arms right down to his fingertips.

Are these the clothes that I will die wearing?

The butterflies fluttering in Armin's stomach seemed to catch fire, consuming his insides with a sudden, sharp nausea. Immediately, Armin turned away from his squadron mates. Hoping that nobody had noticed his outbreak of nerves, he clambered towards the doorway to make his escape. He excused himself hoarsely as he pushed past Hannah, Bertholt, and Connie, then made his escape from the ready room.

His boots stepped from tiled floor plating onto the soft carpet of the junior pilot officers' lounge as the door hissed shut behind him.

The lounge—the same lounge that Armin and his squadron-mates had spent dozens of afternoons and evenings in—was eerily empty. Nobody was sprawled out over the sofas and hoverchairs with a cup of caf in one hand in a datapad in the other. Nobody was being demolished at holochess at the game table by Commander Erwin, who played with his eyes closed and had an undefeated record stretching back three years. As for the sound of laughter and banter—they too were freshly absent this place, leaving it as lifeless as a museum exhibit.

Armin's gaze rested on the small, raised section of floor at the room's center, occupied by a few armchairs and a low table. The Commander had stood right there, the previous night, when he had arrived to announce the fateful news.

Had it really been just nine hours ago that they had all been seated here without a care in the world?

With one last look at the unoccupied chairs and tables in the center of the room, Armin strode through the doors into the cold corridor beyond.

OOOOO

**Thanks for reading! As always, please leave a review, and don't forget to favorite and follow!**

**As you may or may not have noticed, in addition to my Shingeki no Kyojin mania I'm also an avid Star Wars fan as well as somewhat of an aviation buff, so apologies for all of the references and technological jargon that have managed to slip into this work.**

**Before anyone asks me, I think I'll go ahead and state up front that none of the characters from the Shingeki no Kyojin universe here are going to be revealed to be Force-sensitive. You can imagine this person or that person having latent Force sensitivity all you want if that's what you like, but it won't show up in this fic.**

**I have to say that writing has been a load of fun so far. Imagining the ways in which our beloved Shingeki no Kyojin characters end up rubbing shoulders with the great heroes of the Star Wars galaxy is truly wonderful to plan out.**

**It's also been somewhat of a challenge though. Most of my stories so far have had fairly small central casts, which has made it easier to give the characters plenty of 'screen time', so to speak. With such a large scale setting this time around, I'm doing my best to make sure that everyone gets some attention. It's a lot of careful work, though!**

**And yes, I've taken the liberty of assigning last names to Hannah, Dazz, and Franz.**

**Anyway, thanks again for reading, and stay tuned for more!**


	4. Flaming Water, Frozen Earth: Chapter 4

**Flaming Water, Frozen Earth**

**Chapter Four**

-DOCUMENT START-

INFORMATION AVAILABLE FOR PUBLIC DISCLOSURE:

DOCUMENT#: LAF48235

GRAND LIBRARY OF THE FORMER GALACTIC EMPIRE, CORUSCANT

**CARIDA IMPERIAL MILITARY JOURNAL, VOLUME 807, ISSUE 09**

**EDITORIAL: ADDRESSING MYTHS AND MISCONCEPTIONS REGARDING THE COMBAT EFFECTIVENESS OF AT-AT AND AT-ST CLASS ARMORED ASSAULT WALKERS **

In the wake of recent military operations conducted on Hoth and Gorman, it has risen to the attention of Imperial Army command that the All Terrain Armored Transport and its smaller cousin, the All Terrain Scout Walker, have been saddled by the galactic public and by those similarly uninformed with a reputation for combat vulnerability, structural instability, and generally limited utility.

As numerous rebel ground formations have discovered prior to, during, and since these key engagements, such misguided perceptions of walker-type vehicles as clumsy and useless cannot be farther from the truth. In reality, armored assault walkers enjoy numerous important advantages over similar categories of repulsorlift-powered transport and ground effect vehicles:

First and foremost, the removal of the need for walker-type vehicles to account for thrust-to-weight considerations permits AT-ATs and AT-STs to mount far heavier armor than any repulsor hovervehicles in their class. This permits armored walkers to sustain and shrug off battle damage and incoming fire to an extent that repulsor-powered tanks and transports simply cannot match.

Next, armored assault walkers, contrary to popular perception, in fact enjoy better handling on rough or rugged terrain than near-ground hovervehicles. While combat hovertanks and similar vehicles that have a higher operational ceiling can indeed traverse rough terrain with even greater ease, their greater flight altitude leaves their drive systems critically vulnerable to enemy fire. Assault walkers are further favored by their near-complete immunity to bounce-mines and sensor-mines that are triggered by repulsorlift fields.

Most importantly of all, the power savings that result from the use of a walker drive system instead of repulsorlift engines permit combat walkers to not only mount heavier main and secondary energy armament, but also carry far greater loads of troops and other materiel. In addition, assault walkers further enjoy reduced noise signature and improved operational range compared to hovertank and hovertransport vehicles.

Lastly, the psychological warfare advantages conveyed by the intimidating appearance of assault walkers cannot be understated or underestimated enough.

In both computer simulations and formal large-scale military exercises, as well as in the crucible of real combat, armored assault walker formations have proven themselves time and time again to be harder-hitting and more resilient to battle attrition than comparable units equipped with hovertanks or repulsorlift assault transports.

In summary, it is best to let the Rebels cling to the comfort of their false myths, for when they are confronted by these elite Imperial shock forces in person, those lies and their own smoldering corpses will be all that they have left to them.

**SIGNED,**

**GENERAL MAXIMILLIAN VEERS**

**COMMANDER, IMPERIAL TWO-HUNDRED-THIRTY-FIRST ARMOURED BREAKTHROUGH DIVISION: "BLIZZARD FORCE"**

**ISSD-1 **_**EXECUTOR**_

**DATESTAMP 39:10:7 **

-END OF DOCUMENT—

OOOOO

Gone was the jocular laughter and easygoing conversation that had filled the main hangar over the past weeks and months. As the orange-clad pilots sprinted from the base corridors into the glare of floodlights, they found themselves swept up in a storm of frenzied activity that seemed to fill every square meter of the vast chamber. A calm voice was nowhere to be heard among the ground crewmen milling about in the shadow of the great transports—only curt orders and yelled exchanges penetrated the racket of the cargo-loading droids and the roar of massive engines warming up for flight.

They gathered in the center of the hangar around Princess Leia for the final briefing.

Armin had never met the Aldaraanian noble, nor had he ever seen her up close in person. As she outlined their combat orders, Princess Leia seemed to project the very picture of resolve and courage. Surrounded by the fighter pilots, she paced back and forth at the center with a fiery determination that gave her the air of a giant among them, even though she stood perhaps a couple of inches or so shorter than Armin did.

A part of Armin wondered if it was all a front. He searched the princess's dark brown eyes, curious if she was secretly just as nervous as they were, or if she really felt as courageous as she appeared on the outside. If it was an act, he couldn't tell.

"All troop carriers will assemble at the north entrance. The heavy transport ships will leave as soon as they're loaded," she was now saying. "Only two fighter escorts per ship. The energy shield can only be opened for a short time, so you'll have to stay very close to your transports."

Hobbie Klivan, whom Armin recognized as one of Rogue Squadron's seasoned aces, spoke up in a skeptical tone. "Two fighters against a Star Destroyer?"

The princess acknowledged Hobbie's interruption with a small nod and continued, looking back around the circle of pilots to each of them in turn. "The ion cannon will fire several shots to make sure that any enemy ships will be out of your flight path. When you've gotten past the energy shield, proceed directly to the rendezvous point. Understood?"

A chorus of acknowledgements rose from the crowd of men and women. Dazz, in particular, barked out "Yes ma'am!" with an enthusiasm that was truly unexpected from him.

Before she moved to head back towards the command center, Leia lowered her voice, and Armin perceived in her sudden sincerity a hint of who the princess really was at heart.

"Good luck."

With that, Princess Leia Organa of the House of Aldaraan, former Senator of the Galactic Senate, turned and strode briskly away, flanked by an aide and two Alliance soldiers.

"OK!" screamed the deck officer, bringing his combat gloves together in a loud clap. "Everybody to your stations! Let's go!"

The pilots dispersed. Those assigned to transport escort paused to shake hands and wish luck to those participating in the battle on the planet's surface, then walked off towards the rows of X-wings. The famous aces of Rogue Squadron departed at a fast walk, the hanger with their airspeeders located just a hundred or so meters away. The fighter bay holding the Scouting Corps's T-47s was a much further distance from the main hangar, and so Commander Erwin ordered the squadron into a fast jog once more. Flight boots pounding on the rough metal deck, they broke away from their fellow pilots as a group.

Ground crew personnel and infantrymen looked up as the squadron of twenty-four pilots approached, waving their hands and wishing them well with excited cries.

"Go get 'em, Green Group!"

"Good luck, Commander! See you at the rendezvous!"

They passed the empty berth where the _Milennium Falcon_ had sat a few days ago before Captain Solo had ordered it moved to a dedicated docking bay of its own. Puddles and stains from hyperdrive coolant and machine lubricant still marked the space the ship had once occupied, testament to Han and Chewbacca's devotion to its maintenance.

Armin wondered if the smuggler captain still remembered his name.

They passed a line of 'monuments'—Alliance soldiers crippled beyond the ability to serve—waiting to board a transport. Some sat wheelchair-bound due to severe nerve damage. Others were led and guided by service droids, blinded by plasma or laser fire beyond the aid of bionic eye replacements. Still others stood in the queue with hunched backs, bent over beneath the weight of too many organ replacements or prosthetic limbs to walk or stand normally. They spared the Scouting Corps pilots barely a glance. Glum and resigned, they awaited evacuation—living reminders of the harsh truth that once a soldier joined the Alliance, they could never be discharged from its service except by death.

They passed a group of soldiers from the Stationary Guard Division driving a utility speeder along the hangar floor in the opposite direction. Armin spotted a familiar face behind the controls and elbowed Eren and Mikasa excitedly as they ran beside him before pointing and waving to Captain Hannes. Recognizing the three pilots in turn, the middle-aged ion cannon operator waved back, calling out something that was lost amidst the din.

An instant later, the speeder was vanishing behind them, the blond head of their fellow Shiganshima native receding into the distance.

Finally, they entered the squadron fighter and speeder hangar. Once through the chamber's entrance doors, they passed the double row of the Scouting Corps's twenty-four X-wing fighters, each instantly recognizable by the double row of green stripes painted across the S-foils and down the nose of each starfighter. From behind the cockpits, their astromech droids beeped and whistled as they watched the squadron run past as a group. Armin looked back over his shoulders at the fighters as they jogged onwards, reflecting grimly that not all of the X-wings would be reunited with their pilots at the ground battle's conclusion.

Ahead in two neat rows sat the twelve T-47 airspeeders they would ride into battle.

With a raised hand, Commander Erwin motioned for them to halt. Captain Mike Zacharius stepped out to one side from behind the commander's shoulder, turning around to face to the column.

"Pilots, assemble!"

As one, they each took three steps forward to form two rows of ten pilots each. Taking their helmets and cupping them under their right arms, they straightened their backs and stood proudly at attention before the commander.

Standing in the first row, flanked by Christa and Eren, Armin could feel his heart starting to beat faster, and the jitters in his stomach that had subsided earlier were returning. Ignoring the fluttering sensation of worry inside him, he kept his head high and his spine ramrod-straight, refusing to allow any sign of unease to show outwardly. Damn it, he thought. He'd hoped he'd outgrown his pre-battle shaky nerves.

"At ease!"

They relaxed. Commander Erwin stepped forward, looking up and down the squadron's ranks. After first allowing himself a hard, thin smile at the sight of the pilots lined up before him, he began opening his mouth to deliver his customary pre-battle address.

Just at that moment, an interruption arrived in the form of a black-clad Alliance commando who sprinted past the squadron's two rows before skidding to a halt in front of the commander.

"Sir! Lieutenant Marlow Sanders, Alliance Intelligence Interior Security Brigade!"

To Armin, the soldier was the very picture of what he'd always imagined an elite foot soldier would look like. Tall and athletic, the commando gave off an air of experience and extreme lethality. Shorter than Bertholt or Mike Zacharius, less muscular than Reiner, Marlow nevertheless exuded an attitude suggesting that cutting down stormtroopers came as easily to him as eating a meal. A heavy blaster rifle hung from his shoulder, and a deadly assemblage of grenades, equipment, and electronics dangled from his pack, belt, and combat harness. Even the operative's face and hands were stained an intimidating, dark gray with camouflage dye.

Marlow Sanders saluted Commander Erwin. "Sorry about the interruption, sir. I need to speak with your unit immediately."

The commander took the interruption in stride, nodding and taking a step back. "Please."

"Green Squadron pilots! Could I have your attention for a moment?"

He need not have asked. The squadron was already staring, wide-eyed, at this wraith, this phantom-like elite commando standing before them. Armin, too, looked up and down the strange soldier, from the grey skullcap clashing horribly with the man's bowl-cut black hair to the long vibroknife thrust into a calf sheath above one ankle.

It heartened him, in a way, to see for himself how every branch, every sector of the Rebel Alliance had adapted completely to the vicious, one-sided, no-quarter nature of the war that they were fighting.

"Hey, he's kind of cute, don't you think, Jean?" Mina chose that moment to whisper, giggling quietly.

Jean coughed. "What!? Really Mina, at a time like this…?"

The soldier did not appear to have heard the exchange. With a brief, evaluatory glance at all of them, he introduced himself a second time. "I'm Lieutenant Marlow Sanders, Alliance Intelligence Interior Security Brigade."

"This is just a reminder that we are now operating under Protocol Blue," he began, his voice stern and businesslike. "This is a full-scale, short-notice base evacuation."

"Any equipment that can't fly into space or be loaded on a transport…" He waved a hand at their surroundings, indicating with a gesture the hangar cranes and refueling vehicles, the spare parts inventory and the repair bays. "… is getting left behind."

Suddenly, he glared at all of them. "I can't make this clear enough—once you land, _do not under any circumstances allow your flight computer and comm system to fall into enemy hands!_ Before you take off, set your data systems to self-wipe if your vital signs turn critical. Follow all proper code procedures."

More than anything, this lecture suddenly drove home to Armin the reality of what they were doing. This was not just another battle. This was no simple base relocation. This was a desperate all-out evacuation, taking place directly under the guns of a full Imperial battle fleet.

They were fleeing.

"—and once you've completed your mission, or if your speeder is forced down, plant a thermal detonator inside the cockpit to destroy everything inside. If you can, of course."

Lieutenant Marlow let out a short sigh. "I know you'll have a lot on your hands very soon, but remember this: if the Empire breaks our codes or locates the rendezvous point, then the Alliance is as good as finished."

"Thank you," he finished.

Then, it was Commander Erwin's turn to speak. Quietly thanking the security brigade officer in turn, he stepped before the squadron.

The commando left as suddenly as he had appeared before them, racing away at a full sprint as he raised a comlink to his lips. The last Armin saw of him was a dark silhouette darting into the base corridors, blaster rifle bouncing at his shoulder.

It was Erwin's turn, finally, to speak to them. This time, his voice, instead of assuming the fiery, passionate tenor that they were used to, began by assuming a tone that was almost fatherly to the ear. "I will be honest with you—our unit is understrength, and a third of our pilots are not only inexperienced but also well below the standard of training expected of frontline combat pilots."

"Furthermore," he added, spreading his hands out to either side of him, "the majority of our veteran squadron members are accustomed to starfighter combat in planetary orbit or in deep space. Even many of our most experienced pilots are unused to flying in a close air support role."

Suddenly, the commander's voice surged, ringing with the energy of a war trumpet of ancient times. "Our squadron may be underprepared," he declared, "But! The hours that lie ahead of us will decide nothing less than the future survival of the Alliance!"

Armin felt a surge of adrenaline travel down his back at Erwin's words. Looking around, he saw his fellow pilots equally impressed by the do-or-die nature of their mission. A few feet away, Ymir's face was stern and resolute. At Armin's shoulder, Eren's expression was equally stoic, his eyes afire with an eager spark of spirit. Even members of the ground and hangar crews around them were glancing in the squadron's direction, listening in.

"The supplies and personnel carried by the evacuation transports represent our best hope of ever creating a galaxy without tyranny. Our ability to cover their withdrawal will be crucial. You must buy their safety—with your lives if you must!"

The words rang out across the hangar in the frigid air, and this time, a shiver of chilling mortality raced down Armin's spine.

Even Erwin's speech was uncharacteristically shallow and rushed, as though hastily improvised. Why did Armin have such an uneasy feeling about this upcoming battle?

"In every open battle ever fought over the course of our rebellion, the Empire has won victory after victory almost without exception," Erwin reminded them all. "However, if we throw them back here, then the universe in which we can finally strike back will be within our grasp! We—!"

Just at that moment a signal tone interrupted the commander, blaring twice loudly and causing Christa to jump in surprise beside Armin. At the sound of the siren, he saw Levi, Hanji, and the other veteran pilots visibly steel themselves. Teeth gritted, they fidgeted where they stood, tightening their flight gloves, adjusting the chinstraps of the helmets they carried.

With that pealing alarm, Command had just sent the order for their squadron to launch.

At the far end of the long hangar, a parka-clad ground crewman cupped his hands around his mouth to scream to a comrade over the whine of the repulsorlifts engines.

"Chet! Hit it—open the doors!"

Erwin, glancing over to the great durasteel doors that were about to open to the outside air, returned his gaze hurriedly to the pilots assembled before him. He snapped into a traditional Aldaraanian salute, placing his right hand over his heart as he concluded his address to them.

"Pilots!" he roared. "Good luck, and may the Force be with you!"

They paused only to return the salute. Then, they were off, sprinting towards their fighters as they pulled their helmets on, fastening them at the chinstraps. Most of them sought out their fellow gunner or pilot before heading for their assigned speeder. Armin, however, ran alongside Eren and Mikasa as they made their way up the left side of the vast chamber.

As he ran, Armin glanced back over his shoulder. Behind him, Franz and Hannah were sharing a long kiss in the center of the room, the last two pilots to start moving. As Armin watched, they broke apart and moved at last towards their airspeeder, leaving the floor empty.

With a groan of protesting machinery, the hangar doors began opening, spilling the violently bright Hoth sunlight across the floor of the flight deck.

"Hey, it's sunny out there!" Armin heard Connie exclaim.

"Of course it's sunny! Didn't you read the weather report?" Thomas Wagner shot back, laughing.

With the entering doors, cold air spilled like a flood into the hangar, greeting Armin's face and neck with an icy, painful kiss that made him inhale sharply in shock. The rest of his body, wrapped in the temperature-controlled pilot's suit and all but immune to the frigid gust, moved normally, ignorant of the frozen atmosphere around them.

To either side, Armin could see his fellow pilots arriving at their T-47s, clambering into the cockpits, fastening flight harnesses as service personnel milled around them making last-minute adjustments to the squat, angular airspeeders.

"Yi-yiiip ayo! Ay!" Sasha yelled in a traditional Arrakiyan hunting cry as she leapt onto her fighter after Connie.

Out of the corner of his other eye, Armin caught a glimpse of Jean, grim-faced, stepping slowly up to his own T-47. Marco already sat in its gunner's seat, concentrating intently as he monitored several displays as part of their pre-flight checks.

Next to them, Auruo and Petra stood side-by-side in front of their speeder.

"I'm looking forward to painting some kill markers on this baby," Auruo bragged.

"Pssh…" Petra groaned. "The T-47s are getting left behind, remember?"

Finally, they reached Eren and Mikasa's craft. Armin slowed, and the three of them caught each other in a fierce hug. His face pressed into Eren's shoulder, the scent of Mikasa's faint perfume in his lungs, Armin spoke.

"Eren… Mikasa… be careful out there, okay?"

"You too, Armin." Eren replied, his voice dead serious.

"Don't take any reckless risks," Mikasa urged him. "We'll watch your back."

Armin nodded. "Same to you two."

Eren's arms tightened around the two of them, then loosened as he was the first to leave the embrace. Then Armin let go too, and the three of them shared a brief smile.

Around them, the whine of repulsorlifts increased steadily in pitch, the wail of countless engines like a growing wind whose strength would sweep them all away. Armin could see cockpits beginning to close along the rows of T-47s.

He turned to face the open hangar doors. There, framed as though part of a hologram, stretched the vast expanse of the frozen plain, backed by the harsh, black lines of the distant Clabburn range. Outside, the snow and ice gleamed in the sun, shining with the purest highlights of white and blue.

Then and there, Armin was solemnly reminded that Hoth was a planet that had never before borne witness to the devastation of war.

Up ahead and to his left, his airspeeder waited.

**OOOOO**

**I do love integrating scenes from the movie with this fic… don't worry, though, I shall refrain from overindulging and leave things at this. Almost everything from here on out will be largely original, with only incidental references to the main Star Wars storyline. That said, everything will remain canon-compliant, so no, there will not be a lightsaber duel between Armin and Darth Vader at the story's climax. :P**

**And yes, Marlow deserves to be somewhat of a badass…**

"**SIGNED,**

**GENERAL MAXIMILLIAN VEERS**

**COMMANDER, IMPERIAL TWO-HUNDRED-THIRTY-FIRST ARMOURED BREAKTHROUGH DIVISION: "BLIZZARD FORCE"**

**ISSD-1 **_**EXECUTOR**_**"**

**-Can I confess to having given myself the chills?**

**^^Please pardon the somewhat hammy introductory public document—now is that foreshadowing or what? Haha…**

**That's right—next chapter, things get hot as the Battle of Hoth kicks off!**

**As always, thanks for reading, and don't forget to favorite, follow, and review!**


	5. Flaming Water, Frozen Earth: Chapter 5

**Flaming Water, Frozen Earth**

**Chapter Five**

-DOCUMENT START-

INFORMATION AVAILABLE FOR PUBLIC DISCLOSURE:

DOCUMENT#: TOA52314

ALLIANCE GRAND MEMORIAL LIBRARY, CORUSCANT

**ALLIANCE MILITARY WEATHER REPORT for the SOUTHERN RIDGE of the CLABBURN MOUNTAIN RANGE, in the EQUATORIAL region (6.8 DEGREES LATITUDE NORTH) of the planetoid HOTH in the HOTH SYSTEM**

**ON THE FOLLOWING GSC DATE (Galactic Standard Calendar):**

**38:6:7 **

**(LOCAL SUMMER)**

SUNNY with CIRRIFORM CLOUDS at 6,700 METERS until 1650 HOURS.

After 1650 HOURS: OVERCAST with ALTOSTRATUS CLOUDS at 3,600 METERS (BREAK at 4,200 meters) and CIRRIFORM CLOUDS at 6,000 METERS.

TEMPERATURE at -22.6 DEGREES CENTIGRADE (H) and

-50.7 DEGREES CENTIGRADE (L).

WINDS at 22 km/hr from 310 DEGREES TRUE throughout the day.

ATM PRESSURE of 0.97 ATMOSPHERES

VISIBILITY of 21.8 KILOMETERS at 3,500 METERS.

HUMIDITY at 56.2 PERCENT

ZERO PERCENT chance of PRECIPITATION

ULTRAVIOLET index NEGLIGIBLE

**COLD WEATHER WARNING IN EFFECT UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE:** All personnel engaged in outside surface operations are required to wear Class III arctic protective clothing or greater at all times.

**REMARK: **

**ECHO BASE UNDER PRIORITY EVACUATION ORDERS**

**NEXT FORECAST POSTPONED INDEFINETLY.**

-END OF DOCUMENT—

OOOOO

It was a sight that made Armin's heart swell with pride.

The snowscape below was teeming with more activity than Armin had ever seen. Companies of Alliance infantrymen in gray uniforms issued forth from hidden entrances, rushing to take up their positions in the trenches and fortifications of the defensive perimeter. Transport vehicles, moving singly or in pairs, loaded with ammunition and supplies for the battle, followed the foot soldiers like obedient beasts of burden. Laser turrets swiveled in their mounts as their gunners tested their arcs of traverse. On the south edge of the base, another transport and its two escorting X-wing fighters lifted off from the flat terrain, their thrusters throwing up billowing clouds of snow powder as they left the ground. In the blue sky above them, a few clusters of dark silhouettes inched higher towards the clouds—the twelve snowspeeders of Rogue Squadron, flying northwest at full throttle.

Green Squadron, however, was turning south, led by Erwin's veteran flight. The mid-morning sun behind their backs and to the left, they sped towards the horizon as though chasing their own faint shadows across the ice.

In many ways, though, it almost felt like just another routine patrol. The same wind whipped around the outside of the airspeeder. The same whine of powerful engines filled the cockpit. The buzz of intermittent comm chatter, the squeak of the pilot's harness when he moved, the clicks of noise as Mina flipped switches and adjusted system settings from the back seat—Armin had long lost count of how many hours he had spent listening to the familiar sounds.

And below stretched the same peaceful, pristine wonderland that he had soared over dozens of times.

"How you feeling, Armin?" asked Mina from the seat behind Armin's, her restraints rustling in the same way as always as she turned to look over her shoulder at him.

"Fine!" he replied. "You, Mina?"

"Doing great!"

And from her tone, Armin knew from experience that she had smiled as she'd said that.

Indeed, all trace of Armin's doubts and worries seemed to have evaporated. He felt, if anything, relatively confident—even a little restless. Maybe he really was deceiving himself, imagining that this was just another uneventful day on patrol. Or perhaps his sense of ease was from the reassuring touch of the control yoke in his palms, from its reminder that, if he flew, banked, and turned just right, presenting the right firing opportunities for Mina to capitalize on, he could have a real, tangible impact on the battle to come.

"It's been fun," Mina added, "but somehow I don't think I'll miss it here much."

Armin wondered if he was the only one in the squadron who felt a strange sense of regret that, one way or another, this was his last flight over the surface of Hoth.

He wasn't quite sure why he was sad to leave, either. It wasn't that he'd grown used to the quiet, or to their peaceful routine here. Many of the Alliance's other base worlds had been just as remote and tranquil. Hoth, certainly, hadn't treated him kindly. The dry, cold air made him susceptible to nosebleeds, and the interior of the base corridors felt dark and claustrophobic, making him feel like some kind of underground digging creature.

"I wonder if some groups are heading elsewhere besides the rendezvous," Armin mused aloud.

"What makes you think that?"

"I wouldn't be surprised if some units have been assigned other missions. Like Annie's team, for example, or—…"

"Ah, I see…" Mina interrupted, laughing knowingly.

"What?" exclaimed Armin, nonplussed.

"Never mind…" she said, and Armin, turning in his seat, saw her wave a gloved hand dismissively.

Returning his head to face the front, Armin scanned the skyline from east to west. He saw no sign of the inbound Imperial ground forces—only the same craggy mountains, the same frozen dune sea of blue and white, the same wild clouds of snow powder racing and tumbling across the plain.

A part of him felt that it could be no coincidence that the Alliance—the defiant, the bold, the freedom-championing Alliance—had chosen this ice planet as their home. In a way, their stand at Hoth represented the dream of all soldiers of the Alliance to Restore the Republic to dare the unthinkable even in the face of opposition that seemed invincible.

Hoth could be colonized. The galaxy could be reformed.

In the end, Armin knew, what they were attempting might truly be impossible, but they would go to their graves with the comfort of knowing that at least they had tried.

"Green Group. Any improvement on scanners?"

Armin looked down at his dashboard displays as a chorus of negative responses filled the squadron's comm channel in response to the commander's query.

Hanji's voice stood out. "Negative, Erwin. I've boosted friendly IFF codes to help our craft stand out better, but there's no hope of cleaning up the other interference."

It appeared that the Imperials had substantially improved their sensor jamming capabilities since the last time Armin had flown in battle. Armin stared at his sensor screens and saw nothing but the same cloud of red dots that had been filling the monitor since takeoff—fake hostile signals generated by the enemy to conceal their true numbers and locations. Only the interspersed green blips were real, signifying the twelve aircraft of the Scouting Corps squadron as well as the gun positions, missile batteries, and ground vehicles of the base defenses that they were flying over.

"Understood," came the commander's resigned reply. "Pilots—climb to one thousand meters. We'll have to use visual scanning."

They followed Erwin's lead, rising higher into the bright morning sun. To either side of him, Armin could see the heads of his fellow squadron mates turning from side to side as they ignored their sensor readings to peer down at the ground below.

Through the tinted transparisteel of his cockpit canopy, Armin allowed himself a quick glance up at the heavens, wondering if he'd be able to catch a flash or two from the space battle in orbit. Up above, the sky was brilliant and clear, with only a canopy of light, puffy cirrocumulus clouds, hanging in clumps at high altitude as though sitting atop a plate of glass.

A peaceful picture—but even as Armin watched, he spotted a burst of bright crimson dart upwards from the planet's surface, vanishing into the upper atmosphere.

He looked back briefly over his shoulder at the hills behind them. Those shots had come from the base's heavy ion cannon. Armin imagined Hannes in a control room somewhere, leaning over a sensor display as he barked out the order to fire.

He remembered the defiant cheers that the ground crewmen had raised upon the announcement, just as Armin had been about to lower and lock his airspeeder's cockpit, that the first transport had successfully jumped into hyperspace. Since then, text transmissions had updated them all on the progress of the evacuation. So far, four transports had escaped to lightspeed right under the noses of the Imperial fleet, with no losses so far.

Perhaps they would make it off this planet more smoothly than he'd thought.

Suddenly, Mikasa's voice filled Armin's headset. "Enemy group sighted at 11 o'clock, distance fifteen kilometers!"

"I see them too," Reiner added, "I count four AT-ATs and a picket of AT-STs. I don't see air cover or any other vehicles."

Armin squinted in the direction that Mikasa had indicated, and then he saw them.

Almost invisible among the black outcrops of a bare, rocky ridge, four blocky silhouettes moved across the high ground, surrounded by shorter, faint shadows that were only barely visible to the naked eye.

"Good eyes, Mikasa," Hanji transmitted. "Report it in to headquarters."

As planned, the snowspeeders slowed, banking into a languid horizontal circle that took them away from the distant enemy. Reaching forward, Armin hauled back on the throttle controls before following the speeder in front of him into the gradual turn.

As they left their former flight path, Armin turned his head, eyeing the group of walkers traversing the ridge below. For now, the four-legged and two-legged steel beasts resembled harmless grazing creatures as they strode laboriously over the broken terrain.

He wondered if any of the walker pilots were looking back up at them. Were they feeling nervous too, as they watched the wing of aircraft circling far above them?

"No Imperial air cover?" Mina wondered aloud, her voice disbelieving.

"Probably scared of our missile batteries," Armin explained. "They can still acquire targets by detecting engine emissions."

"All flights!" the commander suddenly ordered. "Base command has acknowledged our sighting and has ordered us to attack. Form up on Green Two. Attack Pattern Mu."

"Flights Two and Three will target the auxiliary light walkers to the east and west of the heavy walker group. Flight One—maintain current altitude. We will assist as needed before moving to neutralize the AT-ATs." Commander Erwin continued outlining the assault even as Armin wrestled with the control yoke, joining his squadron mates in a frantic but organized aerial ballet as they rushed to assume the chosen ground attack formation.

Like a squadron of cavalrymen racing into a charge, the Scouting Corps aircraft pointed their noses down at the crest of the ridge, bearing down at full speed towards the Imperial formation.

"Here we go!" Auruo whooped over the comm.

"Cut the chatter, Green Four," Levi's voice chided, unamused.

Armin felt his own surge of exhilaration as he eased his snowspeeder deeper into the dive. He took a deep breath, exhaling over several seconds as he watched the ground growing larger in his windscreen. There it was again—the same sense of apprehension mixed with eagerness, a cocktail of hope and worry stirred up by his mind's desperate efforts to grapple with the unforeseeable consequences of imminent battle.

Armin clenched his teeth in determination, fighting the flurry of nervous thoughts with the practiced litany that he'd developed through experience. Gripping his pilot's yoke with resolution, he ran through the well-worn list of stern self-admonishments. Don't do anything stupid. Think before you act. Don't panic. Stay gentle with your flight controls. Watch your instruments. Stay aware of what's happening around you.

"Weapons powered, all systems green," Mina reported, her own voice tense but steady.

Calm. He took another deep breath. Now he could hear the pitch of the snowspeeder's engines changing ever so slightly as they descended into gradually thicker air. He could feel his stomach drop as he nosed down harder into their attack dive.

As they neared the enemy vehicles, Armin's tactical display highlighted four of the light walkers in yellow—the targets that had been assigned to his flight.

"Mikasa," he spoke up. "You and Connie hit the two AT-STs in front. Hannah and I will take out the ones to the rear."

"Understood," came her reply, formal and focused. From the tone of her voice, Armin might as well have been a total stranger rather than a childhood friend.

"Everyone, make sure to keep up your airspeed, and watch your flight paths once we're in range of their return fire," Armin reminded the crews of the three snowspeeders under his command.

He glanced to both sides, checking the integrity of their formation through the cockpit glass. There, directly to the left, was Mikasa and Eren's T-47, with Connie and Sasha's craft just beyond. To the right, maintaining perfect position, flew Hannah and Franz's snowspeeder, Franz's determined face visible through the rear window of their speeder's cockpit.

This would be their first battle. Thinking back to his own terrible introduction to the chaos of combat, Armin fervently wished them the best of luck.

"Eyes open Green Group," Hanji cautioned them all over the squadron channel. "We've just entered their effective range."

"All flights," Erwin added, "split off and engage your designated targets as soon as we clear the ridgeline."

Armin's fingers tensed on his flight controls as he focused intently on the boxy gray silhouettes ahead, poised to dodge as soon as he saw the first flash of their guns.

Yet for what seemed like several long minutes, the Imperial vehicles did not open fire. The walkers, black against the snow and sky, simply marched forward without turning to face the incoming threat. Passive and innocuous, like pieces on a game board, they gave no indication that they had even sighted the airspeeders heading straight for them.

In that final moment of silence and peace, Armin permitted himself one last stray thought—that he would not die here on Hoth, at the farthest, most barren edges of the galaxy, nor would he allow any of his friends to die here.

Before them, the black rock outcropping loomed larger and larger until Armin could see every boulder, every fissure in the wall of dark stone. Still, the commander's T-47 led them closer and closer as they hurtled towards the face of the ridge, to the point where every piloting instinct in Armin's body was urging him insistently to pull away or risk dashing his aircraft against the bare rock…

Then, at what must have been the last possible instant, Erwin's snowspeeder swerved into a sharp climb. Yanking back hard on the control yoke, Armin followed, feeling the force of gravity push him hard into his cockpit seat as his T-47 rose to clear the ridgeline by less than twenty meters. With screams of protest from their repulsorlift engines, the squadron soared over and past the ridge's crest.

The day's hue turned a flashing red.

Armin saw it a second too late. A whole line of AT-STs, concealed behind the ridge, invisible to their scanners even now. Over a dozen pairs of twin viewports stared pitilessly back at the Alliance squadron like gaping black eyes as fire spat forth from countless chin-mounted blaster cannons.

Crimson bolts seared the very sky. A continuous barrage of flashes bombarded Armin's retinas, burning them white with the sheer volume of laser fire.

Operating on instinct, mind hijacked by a gripping fear, Armin moved desperately to evade, but no patch of air was free from the hurricane of energy. Caught in the river of death, he floundered upstream blind and naked, expecting the end to arrive at any instant. What could possibly survive in the face of heat and light so deadly that it seemed like some force of nature?

A part of Armin rose up in anger and helpless frustration as he stared oblivion in the face. He glared at the oncoming storm of blaster bolts even as primal terror drowned his body in adrenaline and ice. This was not a battle, but an execution by firing squad.

"Ten is hit! Ten is hit!"

Brilliant orange flame was issuing forth from the starboard engine of Christa and Ymir's T-47 as it slowed and lost altitude, wavering as Ymir fought to regain control.

The blaster cannon fire flew at them like horizontal rain.

He became aware that the squadron's communications channel had filled with panicked chatter. Mina was yelling violently from the gunner's seat behind him. Armin could feel his lips moving, his throat straining as his vocal cords manipulated the air in his lungs, but somehow he couldn't hear a word of what his own voice were shouting.

"Shoot back! Damn it!" Jean bellowed.

"Heavy fire! Heavy fire!" Thomas Wagner was screaming.

"Shit, I've got major damage!"

"Take evasive action!"

"All units, break off now!" Erwin's command was grim, but resolute and almost chillingly poised.

With his fellow pilots, Armin pulled back and to the side on his control stick, and suddenly the laser bolts diminished as the Imperial gunners were too slow to adjust their aim. As the airspeeders broke from their attack run, scattering like the spreading petals of a flower, the concentrated shower of red-orange beams dissipated into individual streams as each scout walker attempted to track a different T-47.

Panic continued to choke the squadron comm.

"We've taken multiple hits—we can't maneuver!" someone was yelling.

"They got me! Aaargh it burns!" another voice shrieked in agony, piercing their ears.

"Are you wounded!? Bertholt, are you all right!?" exclaimed Connie or Marco.

Suddenly, and with an urgency that immediately stilled the commotion, Levi's voice cut in over the turmoil. "Four, respond!"

Instantly, twenty-some heads spun to look at the T-47 airspeeder that had flying in formation behind and to the left of Erwin's craft.

There was no reply. Petra and Auruo must have been killed instantaneously. Their once-sleek airspeeder a shapeless, smoking wreck, it flew onwards towards the enemy without turning, plummeting earthwards through the hail of incoming fire before impacting the ice below in a shower of black and white.

A long moment passed in which nobody spoke, even as blaster bolts continued to flash past them, pursuing them as they raced away from the ambush.

"Ten, status!" Levi was the first to bark, breaking the silence, a harsh edge to his voice the only audible sign that he had even acknowledged the loss of Petra and Auruo.

The captain's words jolted Armin's attention back to their flight. He glanced down at his instruments, vaguely aware of a feeling that the person flying this T-47 was somehow different from the pilot who had occupied the cockpit's seat just one minute before.

Pushing the unwelcome sensation aside, he focused on the displays before him. All flight systems fully functional. Gaining altitude. Airspeed stable. Threat indicator red. Sensors still jammed. Christa and Ymir's damaged speeder had been the last to complete the turn, and Armin's instruments indicated that Green Ten had lost almost six hundred meters of altitude.

"Starboard engine's gone, sir!" Ymir was reporting. "I'm keeping her in the air for now, but we can't fight!"

"Understood, Ten," replied Erwin's voice. The commander did not hesitate. "Head back to Echo Base at once."

"Yessir." Ymir acknowledged. On the sensor screens, Armin saw the blip representing the damaged speeder break away from the squadron's formation, flying back towards the main base through a cloud of false red dots.

"Good luck, everyone! See you at the rendezvous!" Christa exclaimed. Even over the comm, Armin could hear the countless system alarms filling the cockpit of the other speeder.

At least they sounded healthy and uninjured.

He frowned, reflecting privately on the misfortune that had struck them. Ironic, wasn't it? Had he been among the ambushers, he might well have cheered at the sight of the stricken T-47 crashing earthwards, with another crippled and belching flame as a result of their brilliant surprise attack.

A tactical masterstroke. A cowardly sneak attack. Opposing labels for the same battlefield strategem. Tyrants. Terrorists. So strange, the sweeping labels and psychological tricks by which those separated only by subtly different perspectives could be compelled to entrap and kill one another…

"Any other damage?" Levi asked the squadron.

Gunther let out a sigh. "Port blaster cannon is out of commission. I've de-linked it from the starboard gun and shut it down. Got some landing strut damage. All other systems fine. We can fight."

"A couple shots went into our cockpit…" Bertholt reported with a groan of pain, "I've got some superficial burns, and my fire control systems are out… but Reiner can still engage targets manually."

"Don't be a fool." Levi stated bluntly, "If you require medical attention, then return to base at once."

"I'll be fine," Bertholt insisted, and, imagining the other youth sitting in a blasted cockpit, tending to his burns through blackened holes in his flight suit, Armin felt a deep admiration for his fellow pilot. The tall youth might have cultivated a reputation for timidity, but in truth, he was capable of a tenacity that rivaled any of theirs.

From the seat behind his, Mina spoke softly. "Armin, we're fine—no damage."

"Ok…"Armin shook his head, half-amazed, half-mournful. Incredibly, he and several of the others had escaped without sustaining even a single hit in the ambush.

Luck. Nothing but luck. Poor Petra. Poor Auruo.

He could feel his heartbeat stabilizing, sweat cooling on his skin beneath his flight suit.

"All fighters," Erwin barked, "re-orient on Beacon Zeta, then reform by flights in Pattern Gamma behind me!"

Like a swarm of swallows, the squadron of aircraft rushed to follow the commander's orders. Spinning his head from side to side, checking the position of his fellow pilots, Armin found Erd and Gunther's T-47 up ahead of him and settled into position behind them before signaling for the rest of his flight to follow.

The scattered speeders converged across the open air, reuniting first in pairs, then in flights, gradually assuming the form of a broad arrowhead pointed directly at the line of Imperial walkers that had just disabled two of their kin. Once again, air rushed around Armin's cockpit as they accelerated in a dive, fully alert this time, fingers poised on firing controls.

Like ten vengeful birds of prey, they dropped earthwards.

"Target the AT-ST group and annihilate it!" Erwin roared. "FOR THE ALLIANCE!"

Unlike the protocol-bound Imperial military, the Rebel Alliance permitted some liberties with discipline, and so a chorus of battle yells rose up in unison, their anger and energy expressing emotions that could not be resolved into words.

The impact happened in a flash. One moment, they had been soaring towards the enemy walkers, ignoring the array of blazing-red beams rising to greet them. The next moment, they were past the enemy, wheeling for a second pass as three of the two-legged vehicles collapsed in flames.

Armin remembered only the most fleeting images from the attack. He remembered a bright explosion as Levi's first salvo found his target. He remembered seeing Mikasa's craft zoom dangerously low as it delivered a flurry of shots that severed an AT-ST's leg at the knee.

He'd come so close to an enemy walker that he had heard its drive motors whining as it tried to aim at him.

There was no time to dwell on any of it. He moved instinctively, guided by intuition and experience. His mind was filled with numbers—airspeed, throttle percentage, rate of climb—juggling, calculating, and recalculating as he made snap decisions, juking to avoid blaster fire, swerving to change targets.

Flashing geysers of steam as snow and ice evaporated from laser impacts, the ever-present bright flashes from blaster cannons, friendly and hostile, the scream of engines near and far, the urgent, excited babble of their comm chatter… somehow, he saw and heard it all as they wove through the chaos.

From the back seat, Mina's gunner controls gave her a small degree of control over the T-47's flight direction. While Armin maneuvered, she could concentrate on making small aiming adjustments, using five, maybe ten degrees of turn to fire off precise snap shots with an accuracy that a lone pilot would have found difficult to emulate.

He dove on another AT-ST even as it turned, adjusting its footing to face him in return. He felt Mina assume control. He saw the targeting reticule center on the light walker's main body. Two pairs of deafening blasts and bright flashes told him that she had fired, and he saw blaster bolts flashing into the Imperial vehicle's crew compartment. One pair of beams merely blackened the AT-ST's thick frontal armor, but the next pair of bright rays flew directly into its dark viewports. Instantly, the stream of return fire issuing forth from the walker's chin guns ceased.

Armin pulled away, lifting their T-47 back into the air. As they turned, he glanced at the AT-ST they had attacked and caught a glimpse of it standing, dead and motionless, as smoke and flame poured from its hatches.

They dove and climbed, dove and climbed. Sometimes, when the spray of lethal crimson bolts seemed too thick, they broke away, dodging and gyrating madly across the sky in a dance with death.

His windscreen blackened as soot from the pillars of smoke on the ground below accumulated on the transparisteel canopy. His head began to pound with a dull pain as he pulled the T-47 into sharp turn after turn, subjecting his body again and again to the harsh grip of g-forces. His throat became hoarse as he shouted orders to Mikasa, Connie, and Hannah over the cacophony of laser blasts, engines, and explosions.

At some point, unfamiliar voices began speaking through his helmet headphones, and he became aware that the commander had broadened the squadron comm reception to pick up transmissions from the entire air battle.

"Rogue Three?"

"Copy, Rogue Leader."

"Wedge? I've lost my gunner—you'll have to take the shot! I'll cover for you..."

From the tone of what he could hear, it appeared that things were not going much better to the north.

Imperceptibly but irreversibly, the battle was drifting into a disorganized general melee. Erwin had long ago turned over tactical control of the battle to individual flight pair leaders, and so the combat devolved into a series of bitter duels as duos of T-47s and small groups of Imperial walkers challenged one another, filling the skies and peppering the snow with red death as each sought to blast the another into oblivion.

As their own dueling partner tracked their T-47 mercilessly, Armin threw the snowspeeder into a rolling scissors that defied the incoming blaster fire. His stomach roiling and his vision blurring as he came close to blacking out from the force of his own maneuvering, Armin hung onto the control yoke stoically, keeping the aircraft aloft by sheer will, waiting for just the right moment…

"Now, Mina!"

"Harpoon away!" she cried. "Hit!"

Armin pulled out from their defensive spiral, sending the T-47 careening sideways in a tight horizontal circle. He could not see the AT-ST or where the harpoon had struck it, but he placed all of his trust in Mina's marksmanship as he strained to keep the airspeeder in the sharpest turn possible. If she had miscalculated, this maneuver might just pull their aircraft into the ground from the cable's tension, but if she had aimed perfectly…

He was barely ready for the sharp deceleration that gripped the airspeeder as the wire caught, throwing the vehicle violently off of its former flight path. He threw every bit of force in his body behind the control yoke, regaining control just in time to swerve upwards away from the icy ground.

"Cable detached!" Mina crowed. "Armin, he's ours!"

Immediately, Armin threw their speeder into a climbing turn, banking until they hung, poised in the air, facing their adversary.

Even as the AT-ST's head strained against the cable tangled haphazardly around its legs and command cabin, struggling to bring its blaster cannon to bear on them in time, Armin centered it in his windscreen and watched as Mina blew it in two at the waist with a shower of lethal energy.

He exhaled in relief. That Imperial gunner had been too skilled for his liking.

At that moment, Mikasa's voice blared out over the comm. "Armin, We're in position to trip one of the heavy walkers! Can you cover us?"

Armin swung in the cockpit to check the other T-47's location.

"Negative, Mikasa! Wait! There are still too many AT-STs around it!" he exclaimed.

"Understood. We'll hit the two at point-oh-seven then." Eren replied.

For the first time since the battle had begun, a wayward thought broke Armin's focused concentration on the battle, as a part of him wondered if this, or some other stiff and formal comm exchange, would be the last conversation he would ever have with his closest friends.

At that instant, a high-pitched alarm began blaring insistently in Armin's cockpit, and his blood froze in dread.

Missile locks!

"Green Group! Multiple missile locks! Ready countermeasures!" Hanji was bellowing over the squadron channel.

"It's another platoon of walkers!" Mike reported, "They've got missile launchers fitted!"

Armin saw motion out of the corner of his eye. Moving faster than Armin had ever seen her move, Mina was shooting her arm forward, smacking the activation switch for their airspeeder's smart defense system. He felt the airspeeder shudder as it released chaff canisters and decoy flares, and half a second later, the entire aircraft was rocked by a fierce concussion as the incoming concussion missile detonated just a dozen meters in their wake.

"By the Force…" Armin breathed, "Thanks Mina…"

Mina's next words, however, were filled with urgency instead of triumph. "Reiner! Evade!"

Armin's head whirled to look just in time to see a fireball bloom across the aft quarter of Reiner and Bertholt's T-47, smearing a patch of black smoke against the sky. As they looked on in horror, the airspeeder emerged from the cloud, its cockpit engulfed in flames even as it flew onwards, perfectly straight.

"Eleven's been hit! Eleven's been hit!"

"Reiner! Do you copy!?"

Multiple voices filled the communications channel, but from the stricken speeder came not a word in response.

Armin clenched his teeth. Perhaps the two of them had underestimated the incoming projectile's rate of closure. Perhaps Bertholt had been too badly wounded to deploy chaff and flares in time. Perhaps their missile warning system or their countermeasures had been disabled by the same blaster bolts that had injured Bertholt. They would probably never know.

More missiles streaked across the sky, most of them detonating harmlessly just behind their intended targets, others forcing their prey to maneuver wildly at the last second.

"Flights, reprioritize your targets! Take out those missile-bearing walkers!" Hanji ordered. "Approach at random and—!"

Suddenly, Erwin's voice overpowered her, cutting her off. "Belay that order! The Imperials are nearing Perimeter Rose. We can no longer ignore the troop carriers! Flights One and Three will attack the AT-ATs with harpoons and tow cables! Flight Two will be responsible for eliminating the missile threat!"

Hearing the commander's words, Armin felt his throat constrict. He knew precisely why his flight had been tasked with eliminating the missile-equipped AT-STs. After all, their four fighters had not yet suffered any casualties or sustained any serious damage.

His flight of four T-47s was the only flight still at full strength.

"Oh… that's not fair…" Mina groaned, coming to the same conclusion.

Taking his eyes off of their flight path, Armin turned his head to look south to where six grey silhouettes stood against the horizon, seven kilometers away. Even as he watched, his heads-up display highlighted the sextet of Imperial walkers in gold, indicating that Commander Erwin had just designated them as targets.

He narrowed his eyes. Conventional doctrine held that a two-to-one numerical advantage was required for fighters engaging missile-based anti-aircraft systems. For four airspeeders to engage six missile-fitted AT-STs… The commander's orders were not even a gamble. This was a sacrifice.

In tactical terms, their flight had just been ordered to draw the concussion missile fire that would otherwise target the rest of the squadron.

"Flight Two, form up on me," he directed, reaching out to toggle his comm transmissions to their flight's own channel, his voice surprisingly calm despite the whirling worry and fear inside him. "All gunners—turn over fire control to your pilots and focus everything on missile countermeasures."

The missile lock warning continued blaring in his cockpit even as he swung the T-47 towards the south, slowing down to allow his wingmen to take up formation around him. He watched as thin trails of exhaust flew towards them from the distant enemy.

Franz's voice carried a nervous tremor as he spoke over the comm. "Armin… we can't possibly take on those missile launchers…"

At the last possible moment, their airspeeders shook as they deployed chaff canisters and flares, and the delicate vapor trails swerved away as the incoming projectiles followed the decoys, detonating harmlessly in midair.

Inside Armin, something snapped in response to Franz's words.

"WE HAVE TO!" Armin screamed. His voice reverberated around the cockpit, and he could only imagine how loud his words were ringing in his squadron mates' headphones, but he did not care. "WE HAVE TO DESTROY THEM OR THIS ENTIRE IMPERIAL FORCE WILL REACH THE MAIN BASE!"

The comm was dead silent with shock.

Armin felt a deep, irresistible anger seizing him, taking control of his features and contorting his expression into a snarl. His hands closed tighter around the control column until he was strangling it in a death grip. With the image of the Death Star looming opposite the blue-green world of Aldaraan firmly in his mind, his voice shook and broke as he commanded, "COMMENCE ATTACK!"

The enemy walkers grew ever larger in his front windscreen.

As if by unspoken consensus, in the last moment before they dove upon the enemy, Armin and Eren took up a battle cry that was soon joined by six other voices in a roar that seemed to shake the sky.

"REMEMBER ALDARAAN!"

Again, Armin remembered nothing from the moment of impact—nothing aside from the incessant scream of the missile-lock warning tone in their cockpit as they rose out of the attack dive.

Once again, he fought by instinct. Armin lined up firing pass after firing pass on the two-legged vehicles, interspersing his attacks with wildly unpredictable evasive maneuvers as missiles screamed at him from all directions. Behind him, Mina worked furiously from the back seat, yelling to alert him to missile launches as she struggled to manage the countermeasures suite in the face of the unrelenting enemy fire. All the while, Armin could hear himself shouting commands into his headset with a voice that sounded wholly unlike his own.

A surge of elation rippled through his body as one of the missile-equipped AT-STs collapsed, its drive system afire. It was followed immediately by a spike of panic as a burst of blaster cannon fire passed though the air directly in front of their snowspeeder, and he threw the aircraft into another hairpin corkscrew.

The interior of the cockpit blazed with sudden sunlight, then fell instantly into shadow as they spun and gyrated over the battlefield. Outside, the horizon rolled, clearest blue and blinding white swapping places over and over as the world inverted at dizzying speed around Armin's head.

Then, without warning, he brought the T-47 out of its defensive spiral and screamed earthwards to blast away at another target. The light walker's armor shrugged off his attacks, and he climbed towards the heavens once again, senses primed to react to the next threat.

Ahead, Mikasa's snowspeeder struck another AT-ST from the rear, detonating its armored head with a colossal blast as the light vehicle's fuel and munitions ignited, exploding.

Every conscious thought in his mind was focused on keeping his speeder as close as possible to the enemy. At short range, the walkers would find it close to impossible to acquire and track them with missiles as the T-47s flew circles around them, but if they strayed just a few hundred meters too far away…

"Shit!"

It was Connie.

"Controls are hit!"

Armin whirled in his cockpit to look. There to his left flew Connie and Sasha's T-47, its flight surfaces shredded and blackened by a missile explosion, headed in an increasingly fast dive towards the ground.

With a genuine panic, Sasha added, "I can't cut engine power!"

"You have to pull up!" Mina exclaimed. "Can you still pull up!?"

"Damn it…!" Connie's voice was filled with anger, fear, and a firm note of resignation.

Armin saw every moment. He watched the other T-47 banking towards the ground, tumbling as Connie wrestled with the pilot's yoke, banking still further until suddenly it was heading straight for one of the missile AT-STs marching across the ice below.

From above, helpless with horror, he saw the airspeeder inverting as it neared the snow, crumpling as it collided head-on with the light Imperial walker, tumbling as the two vehicles collapsed together before vanishing in a boiling cloud of smoke, steam, and flame that sent debris and fragments of metal cartwheeling through the air to bounce upon Hoth's gray surface.

His friends' last burst of comm chatter, as though delayed, lingered in Armin's ears:

"Connie, I—!" Sasha had begun.

"TAKE THIS!" Connie had roared.

A second later, Armin's airspeeder flew over the cloud of smoke and fire, and the scene was suddenly behind them. Armin felt an emptiness inside him that had not been there a moment before, as though his friends had taken something from him with their passing. He strained in his flight harness to look behind him, an irrational, stubborn part of him still hoping to see two orange-clad pilots emerging from the wreckage below against all odds.

He saw nothing. Only another pillar of smoke rising skywards, carrying the souls of yet another two friends towards the heavens.

Only Mina's shriek of warning and the red flash of a near miss across his windscreen brought Armin's attention back to the present, and he hauled back sharply on the yoke, bringing their T-47 out of a descent that had almost sent them into the ground as well.

He scanned the horizon with eyes that had briefly begun to water.

Three targets remaining. Three aircraft in his flight still flying.

All things considered, they were trading evenly… better than Commander Erwin could ever have expected from them, but to Armin, those they had lost had meant far more to him than anything that they had gained…

His body had returned to the battle, piloting the snowspeeder aggressively through the fray once more. Armin's mind, however, was filled with that last image of that uncontrolled collision that had transformed two war machines into a single misshapen tangle of lifeless metal—an ugly, blackened tomb with the bodies of his two friends still trapped inside.

A pang of guilt. He had been in command. He had survived for now, where they had not.

A panorama of the battlefield slid across his windscreen as he pushed the T-47 through another turn. In most places, the snowscape remained pristine, gleaming where it lay untouched and unmarked. At the same time, the fighting had left its grim mark upon the plain, littering the frozen ground with smoking wrecks and the craters left by the wayward missiles, the vaporizing impact of blaster bolts, and the heavy weight of walker legs.

Hoth.

Nobody, he knew, would ever return here to this forsaken battle plain to provide Connie and Sasha, Reiner and Bertholt, Petra Ral, or Auruo Bossard with the dignity of a formal burial. The planet that had been their home would now also serve as their grave.

Looking towards his next target, Armin grimly pushed his thoughts aside as he began considering how he would execute an attack run. How would he approach that walker? What part of it would he target as he dove on it, seeking to disable its systems and kill or injure its operators? He saw a flash as another missile entered the air, and he spoke up to alert Mina to its launch.

What else could he do? Connie and Sasha had deserved more. They had deserved so much better in life that their fate felt worse to Armin than any crime or injustice… but such was the nature of the war that they had chosen to fight in.

_Good luck… and may the Force be with you…_

After all, this was the only comfort that the Alliance could spare for its dead—the promise that those left behind would fight on, to give some meaning to the lives of those lost.

OOOOO

**Well, that's another chapter (and a nice long one, at that) for all of you!**

**It makes intuitive sense to me that Armin would be a capable starfighter/airspeeder pilot. He has the mind for the complexities and decision-making involved in combat flight, and the job doesn't demand as much from him physically.**

**I also feel like Mina and Bertholt often aren't given enough credit for their guts by most people, so I did my part to do them justice!**

**As always, thanks for reading, and don't forget to review, favorite, and follow!**


	6. Flaming Water, Frozen Earth: Chapter 6

**Flaming Water, Frozen Earth**

**Chapter Six**

-DOCUMENT START-

INFORMATION AVAILABLE FOR PUBLIC DISCLOSURE:

DOCUMENT#: GMP99647

ALLIANCE GRAND MEMORIAL LIBRARY, CORUSCANT

**RECORD OF MEDICAL TREATMENT PERFORMED**

**PRIMARY MEDICAL BAY**

**ALLIANCE **_**GALLOFREE-**_**CLASS TRANSPORT **_**GALAXY HERO**_

**TREATMENT DATE: **38:6:7 GALACTIC STANDARD CALENDAR, 1513 HOURS LOCAL TIME (HOTH SYSTEM)

**MEDICAL PATIENT: **FLIGHT OFFICER CHRISTA LENZ (57TH SCTAS)

**ADMINISTERING SURGEON: **FOUR-TWO-EM-SEVEN (2-1B TYPE SURGICAL DROID)

**TRIAGE PRIORITY: **LIGHT

**SUMMARY OF INJURIES:**

SECOND-DEGREE FLASH BURNS ON FACE AND NECK

LIGHT SHRAPNEL WOUNDS NEAR COLLARBONE AND AROUND UPPER LEFT ARM

SMOKE INHALATION, MILD CASE

**TREATMENTS ADMINISTERED :**

BACTA MIST INHALATION REGIMEN

REMOVAL OF EMBEDDED SHRAPNEL UNDER ANESTHESIA

BACTA PATCH APPLICATION TO SHRAPNEL WOULD AND BURN AREAS

**POST-TREATMENT PROGNOSIS:**

TREATMENT SUCCESSFUL, SCARRING UNLIKELY

FULL RECOVERY IN SEVEN TO TEN DAYS

AVAILABILITY FOR ACTIVE DUTY IN LESS THAN TWO WEEKS

**PATIENT NOTES:**

PATIENT TO BE TRANSFERRED TO ALLIANCE CENTRAL MEDICAL FRIGATE _**REDEMPTION**_ UPON RENDEZVOUS AT APPOINTED FLEET RALLY POINT

-END OF DOCUMENT—

OOOOO

He had not seen Gunther and Erd die.

It had happened too fast. Armin had been occupied, coordinating with Mikasa to distract a walker threatening Hannah and Franz's snowspeeder with its missile targeting array. He had not even paused to look up when Thomas had suddenly cried out, "Three is down! I repeat, Three is down!"

He pieced together the details from his squadron mates' chatter. It had been another missile strike, and the two veteran pilots had simply vanished in the explosion.

Letting himself sink further into his pilot's seat, Armin felt another pang of sadness ripple through his body at the realization that reality had taken yet another terrible step away from the naïve, hopeful fantasy that he had once imagined would await them at the battle's end. Now, he thought, yet another two friends would be absent from the squadron's ranks at the reunion of those who had survived.

Armin had only lived twenty years, but there—flying across that empty wasteland of ice—he felt as though each of those years hung from his shoulders with double their true weight.

Nor had Armin seen the commander's death. The last thing he had heard was Erwin, straining to make himself heard over the damage alarms wailing in his cockpit.

"Hanji—you have command!" he had growled into his headset.

Over the last two years, Armin had heard Commander Erwin's voice assume countless inflections of tone and spirit—subdued following a mission with heavy casualties, thoughtful during squadron meetings, amused in the midst of carefree cafeteria banter, or blunt and direct when delivering battle orders… But at the very end, Erwin's voice had simply sounded pained, as though he regretted having to leave his squadron while they faced such desperate circumstances.

"Erwin!" Hanji had exclaimed over the comm, to no response.

"Damn it!" Jean had cursed. "Armin, why the hell haven't you dealt with those missile launchers yet? Can't you see we're getting slaughtered!?"

Bitter bile rising in his throat, Armin had bitten back the violent urge to retort, to point out to Jean that Connie and Sasha had already sacrificed themselves to destroy just a single walker, that his flight was doing its very best...

They had finally destroyed two-thirds of the missile AT-ST platoon… only for a second platoon to materialize out of nowhere as Imperial reinforcements had arrived.

Jean had not meant to say what he had said, Armin knew. Jean never meant it. He was just lashing out as he tended to do, expressing in his own way the same grief and horror that they all felt.

Hanji had assumed Erwin's duties with determination, rallying the remaining half of the squadron as she led them in attack after attack with a determination that bordered on fanaticism. The change in command had occurred seamlessly, Hanji's leadership just as natural to the surviving Scouting Corps pilots as Erwin's had been.

Hanji's commands ringing in his ears, Armin had flown over the toppled walkers and the smoking, wrecked speeders, conscious that the skies felt emptier and emptier as time passed.

He seemed to perceive time too slowly, as if space and time inside the confines of his cockpit lagged behind the events taking place outside it. When the battle had moved to the open plain, and the laser turret batteries of the southern Perimeter Rose defenses had opened fire, Armin had soared above the crisscrossing red and gold blaster fire for several whole minutes before he realized that the site of the fighting had moved. When the crackle of communications transmissions through his headset had intensified, filling his head with a constant stream of seemingly meaningless words, an hour seemed to pass before he had finally perceived the growing tone of frustration and defeat.

The continuous chatter—snatches of conversation from the other battle fronts, almost all of it tinged with alarm and desperation—told a story of an irresistible tide of battle advancing against them. At the same time, a note of fatalism had crept into the multitude of voices, as soldier after soldier began to conclude that, perhaps, the outcome of the battle had been preordained from the outset.

"They're debarking troops! Light repeater crews, target enemy infantry in the open!"

"Beta Company—fall back with the wounded to the second line! All gunners—stay at your posts and cover them!"

Everywhere, it seemed, the Imperials were pressing forward with implacable force.

From the air, Armin saw everything.

He watched helplessly as the great AT-ATs slowed to a stop. He looked on, as squad after squad of white-clad troops slid down wires from underneath the giant vehicles to the surface of the snowscape below. He saw Alliance trenches and emplacements shuddering beneath the flash of blaster cannon impacts, heavy and light laser turrets burning as they were hit one after another. He saw bedraggled knots of Alliance soldiers leaving their positions, struggling to the rear with their wounded and what equipment they could carry.

Here and now, truly, the icy battlefield no longer bore any resemblance to the peaceful hinterland that Armin had once known. The ice bled under the heat of the rain of blaster bolts, melting to flow in rivulets across the surface until even the meltwater steamed beneath the barrage as though aflame. Smoke and soot pouring from dozens of ruined vehicles belched thick clouds into the sky—a fog of dark particles that Hoth's winds scattered across the snow, slowly turning the ground grey and black. Yet, despite the blanket of ash, the shining film covering the melting plains still flickered with crimson reflections as deadly beams filled the sky, just as the frozen ground had once caught the sun's light.

Armin could feel the battle's ferocity wearing away at his body with the same persistence that it was attacking the landscape below. His mind had been operating under the constant threat of death for so many hours that even his sense of fear had dulled, until he felt as though he were dodging concussion missiles and bursts of laser fire out of habit rather than terror. His back now ached where it met the pilot's seat, and his flight suit and boots suddenly felt tight and constrictive. Beneath his hands, even the controls felt heavy as he hauled the yoke back, twisted it sideways, and pushed it forward again in an unending cycle. With every hard turn, he could feel the g-forces pushing him closer and closer towards blacking out completely.

All the while, his ears rang with the insistent, incessant tone of the missile lock alarm filling the cockpit, its pitch changing every time a new missile entered the air.

He could tell that his reactions were slowing along with his mind. Compared to his piloting earlier that day, he was now flying as though drunk. Vaguely, he cursed the nerves that had kept him awake for most of the previous night.

What was more, he'd never fought in a sustained battle for this length of time…

Focus, he told himself. Concentrate. You have a mission. You have three—no, two—aircraft under your command to protect.

Licking his cracked lips, Armin forced the whole of his awareness towards the fighting raging all around and below him, redoubling his attention on his surroundings.

He took in the battle lines at a glance. The armored fist of the Imperial force was just a few hundred meters from the battered first line of Alliance trenches now. The breakthrough there was inevitable. But the second line…

Armin scanned the distant ground, noting the flash of blaster cannon, the steady sparkle of dozens of the lighter blaster rifles firing steadily from the zigzagging dugouts.

The second line might yet hold.

He blinked. There. Still highlighted in his heads-up display, bracketed in yellow, two of the deadly missile walkers walked north. Their cannon and missile launch rails pointing ever skywards, they crossed the open ice with a stride that reminded Armin strongly of carrion birds. He gave them a long, bitter glare.

He sighed. "How are we holding up, Mina?"

From behind him, Mina replied with a voice that was similarly heavy with fatigue. "No new problems. Fuel is at half. Blaster cannon actuator charge at full strength."

In his weary state of mind, Armin had stopped listening to her report as soon as he had heard the positive tone of her answer. He nodded, his hands still manipulating the flight controls as though with a mind of their own.

His headset came to life at that moment, crackling fiercely with the whine of blaster fire in the near vicinity of whoever was speaking.

"Green Group, this is Rose South! Imperial troops have taken the first line! They're advancing in the open towards the second trench, but my battalion can't force them back on their own… " Colonel Rico Brzenska's voice snarled over the clamor of the ground battle. "We need support—can you spare a few speeders for lawnmowing?"

"Rose South, I've only got six T-47s left, but we'll give you everything we have!" Hanji responded, her own transmission contaminated by the missile lwarning tone filling her T-47's cockpit.

"Acknowledged, Green Leader. Make it fast—Rose South out."

Armin imagined the white-haired colonel standing, unflinching, among her troops even as blasts from the heavy walkers confronting them shook the ground around their trench. For the second time that day, he recalled that, out of all the Alliance personnel on Hoth, the infantry defending their positions outside Echo Base were facing the lowest chance of being successfully evacuated.

"Armin!" Hanji exclaimed. "I need you and the rest of your flight to disengage and come north now!"

Armin frowned, hesitant to acknowledge the order. What was Hanji planning? If she pulled his flight away from the missile AT-STs, that would leave the walkers free to fire unopposed at the entire squadron. Without his three airspeeders keeping those gunners busy, the Scouting Corps would not last much longer in the air.

"I count eight missile batteries still out there," he pointed out in reply. "If we keep engaging them directly, we should be able to keep drawing most of their fire away from you!"

Their T-47 shuddered as Mina launched yet another countermeasures package, and Armin heard the hiss of the incoming missile's ion engine as it missed, flashing past before disintegrating harmlessly in the open air to his right.

"Armin," Hanji explained grimly. "Erwin was right. We can't keep our airpower split, and if we don't prioritize slowing that ground attack down, it won't matter if we still have speeders flying or not."

With a ripple of guilt, Armin realized that she was right. Amidst everything that had happened, he had completely forgotten. His mission today was not to protect his fellow pilots, or even the squadron as a whole. That had never been their objective.

_Our ability to cover their withdrawal will be crucial. You must buy their safety—with your lives if you must!_

It was strange, how he could easily accept the knowledge that his own life was expendable, while wholeheartedly rejecting the idea of sending any of his friends to their deaths. Armin thought of the dead Commander Erwin, and wondered if ordering good comrades into peril was a lesson that the man had learned with ease or with difficulty.

"I'm giving you five minutes," Hanji added. "Destroy as much of their anti-aircraft force as you can, then link up immediately with my flight above the first trench line!"

"Copy, Green Leader," he acknowledged, biting his lip.

Switching to his flight's comm channel, he spoke. "Flight Two, form up on me. Attack Pattern Epsilon. We'll make one more pass on that anti-air."

A burst of familiar voices confirmed his orders, and Armin was silent as he noticed the absence of Connie's tone of bravado among them.

As the battle on the ground had raged ever hotter, more and more of the Imperial vehicles had lowered their guns from the sky to bring them to bear on the Alliance's surface defenses. Only the anti-aircraft AT-STs had kept their weapons trained on the Scouting Corps squadron. This time, only a few trails of bright blaster fire rose to meet them in place of what had been a concentrated barrage just ten minutes earlier. They dove earthwards in a reverse arrowhead formation, with Armin and Mikasa's T-47s side-by-side, Hannah's craft trailing between them just to the rear.

Gauging the targets' distance and his approach angle intently, Armin brought their three airspeeders lower and lower. The altitude reading displayed in his visor dropped to sixty meters, then thirty, then twenty… His squadron mates, trusting his judgment, followed him down until it felt as though they were barely skimming across the surface of the gray snow.

Through the transparisteel canopy, Armin stared at the two nearby AT-STs, and their dark eyes stared back at him. The time had come.

In an instant, he had turned the control yoke to the right as far as it would go. The airspeeder rolled onto its side, and without missing a beat, Armin pulled the yoke towards him, sending them into a daringly tight turn that threatened to send him and Mina into the icy ground with the slightest maneuvering error. The T-47's directional flaps squealed with the stress of the inertial change, and once again darkness crept inwards along the edges of Armin's field of vision as blood rushed towards his feet.

Now. Obeying his pilot's intuition, Armin centered the controls, bringing the snowspeeder out of its reckless turn. There, six hundred meters distant, centered in the front of his windscreen, stood the two enemy walkers, lined up in a perfect row.

Too slow, the front walker was still turning to aim at the three airspeeders barreling towards it in tight formation. Armin gently manipulated the controls as the distance closed, centering the boxy twin-legged vehicle in his targeting reticule.

Simultaneously, he and Mikasa opened fire, their combined blaster cannon salvo ripping through the AT-ST and sending it keeling over to the ground. A second later, they had flown just meters over the walker's disabled wreck as they zoomed towards its partner.

The second AT-ST had held its fire for fear of hitting the other light walker. It finally began shooting at Armin's speeder, sending a long burst of crimson energy flying towards him. Reacting quickly, Armin pulled the T-47 upwards and away and out of the line of fire. The scream of the repulsorlift engines from Mikasa and Hannah's snowspeeders died away below him as his squadron mates continued onwards.

With the nose of the aircraft aimed towards the sky, Armin did not see what happened. A moment later, a cataclysmic explosion erupted to his rear, followed by Mina's relieved report.

"Both targets down, Armin," she informed him.

"Everyone disengage!" he exclaimed. "Flight Two, regroup on my T-47 and follow me."

Armin exhaled, moisture from his breath of relief briefly fogging his helmet visor. He swung their snowspeeder to face north.

As he led the others in a shallow climb, Armin's relief gradually turned to grimness. In choosing to ignore the remaining missile batteries, the Scouting Corps had just relinquished total control of the air battle to the enemy. Resolving to endure the rain of missiles rising to meet them, they were gambling on the hope that what they had done so far would suffice to keep the squadron in the air—at least long enough to accomplish their mission. How long, he wondered, would they last against relentless attrition and the overwhelming weight of the enemy's numbers?

Ahead, towards the base, the battlefield was a storm of blaster fire flashing back and forth across the ground, shrouded beneath a thickening cloud of water vapor that had grown to cover the entire frontline. Yet, above the turmoil, above the columns of smoke twisting upwards, the brilliant sky still stretched across the horizon in swaths of purest white and blue.

Armin's body moved stiffly, his muscles weary, but he managed to straighten once more in his pilot's harness.

OOOOO

"Armin, I'm detecting more targeting sensor arrays—they have to be shoulder-fired launchers!" Mina cried out.

He saw it—a bright gout of flame bursting from the side of the nearest AT-AT. As the flash subsided, Armin noticed the snowtrooper standing in an opened escape hatch along the walker's body, a launcher tube resting on his shoulder.

The small missile flew upwards, zeroing in on Levi and Hanji's T-47, but Levi outmaneuvered it almost effortlessly, snapping into a hammerhead turn that left the deadly device far behind. With no hope of catching up to its target before exhausting its onboard fuel cells, the missile's internal computer triggered its self-destruct signal, detonating the warhead and scattering metal and polymer fragments across a small patch of sky.

"They're firing portable missile units from the AT-ATs!" Jean exclaimed in alarm.

"I noticed, Kirschtien," Levi quipped sarcastically.

Seeing the Imperial soldier taking aim at him next, Armin banked their speeder, passing over the heavy walker's bulk to shield himself from the launcher below. Turning to look back over his shoulder as he leveled the speeder, he saw to his dismay that another two hatches had been opened along the AT-AT's other side, two more troopers waiting in the openings. Armin threw the aircraft into another hasty turn, taking them behind the walker's rear and out of the line of fire.

He grimaced. With portable missiles guarding the heavy vehicles' flanks, any snowspeeder flying past at low speed would likely be shot down before it could react. Attempting to entangle them with harpoons and tow cables would now be utterly suicidal.

"Armin…" Mina murmured, her voice worried. "We only have four countermeasures packages remaining…"

He winced and was about to reply when the howl of nearby engines diverted his attention.

Levi's speeder was plummeting past them in a power dive. As Armin watched in awe, the veteran pilot dove upon the AT-AT that had fired the missile and sent a bright lance of blaster energy into the nape of the heavy walker's neck. Immediately, a small fire burst to life behind the AT-AT's armored head, and its leg movements slowed before coming to a complete stop.

"Target neutralized," Levi muttered. "Leave it alone. Its driver control link to the main body should be cut."

"Can that thing still fire?" Mina asked aloud.

"Perhaps. Keep your distance!"

At Hanji's order, they climbed higher to exit the effective range of the portable launchers. Blaster bolts and missile trails chased them, but at last, they reached the foot of the clouds, beyond the maximum traverse of the enemy guns below.

Armin checked his altimeter. Three thousand meters.

He treated himself to a panorama of the sky that stretched from shoulder to shoulder. Here and there, other battered speeders flew, just tickling the underside of the cloud carpet. The six of them hovered, drifting with the windstream as their twelve crewmen enjoyed a brief breath of peace.

"Rose South, Green Leader. How you holding up down there?" Hanji transmitted.

"Rose South here," Colonel Brzenska growled in reply. "It's getting hopeless… we're taking heavy casualties from the other three heavy walkers, and they're massing light armor in front of us. We don't have enough anti-vehicle options left to hold them back once they decide to advance…"

An explosion interrupted the Alliance officer, and she paused before continuing grimly, "Your last strafing run cut up their lead infantry elements nicely, but they're already regrouping. We'll likely need another firing pass from your squadron in five minutes or less."

Armin half-listened as Hanji conferred further with Colonel Brzenska over the details of the next attack. He shook his head slightly, clearing his fatigue for a moment. Reaching down, he flipped a switch on the T-47's instrument panel.

"I'm turning fire control back over to you, Mina. You're shooting well today."

Mina let out a short laugh. "Thanks, Armin. I was beginning to get bored back here."

Armin chuckled. What a typical response from her. Reflecting on their time on Hoth, he counted himself grateful that he'd been teamed up with a copilot who was so friendly and easy to work with. Then, a sudden thought occurred to him, and he fell silent.

Detecting that something was amiss, Mina turned in her gunner's seat to look at him. Her grey eyes gave him a searching glance, her round face fixed with a concerned expression. "Is everything all right, Armin?"

"I'm fine." He gave her a small smile, then added. "I was just thinking…"

He felt a small lump in his throat as he continued. "I was thinking that… in case something happens to me… I just wanted to tell you that I'm really glad to have been your wingmate..."

His smile turned crooked with a slight sadness. "…and your friend."

Mina's eyes widened beneath the orange visor of her flight helmet, and she raised a gloved hand to brush her hair to the side. She looked deeply disturbed, and her voice quieted. "Armin, that's… you shouldn't… don't say things like that yet…"

"Don't worry…" Armin shrugged. "I know what you're thinking. It's just that, after Aldaraan, I guess I learned that there were a lot of things that I never got the chance to say to people I cared about before it was too late…"

Mina did not look particularly reassured. Then, her own expression changed, and she averted her gaze, staring through the cockpit canopy at the passing clouds.

"I understand," she finally said. "Thanks, Armin."

They were silent for a few seconds before Mina added, "I feel the same way. The squadron means a lot to me."

She smiled slightly too. "You're a good leader and a good friend."

Abruptly, she faced him again. "Armin—I thought I should tell you… You should know that Annie's pretty fond of you. Just in case, you know…"

For a second, he saw her eyes shining and read the worry, the fear, the hope, and the deep and sincere friendship written in them. He looked into her expression and saw the same terror that he too had felt as he had confronted the possibility of his own mortality. The next moment, Mina had spun away to avoid his glance, resuming her position at her gunner's controls.

"If we all make it out of here in one piece, you should make some time to go talk to her," she concluded, her voice trembling.

Armin turned back to face his instrument panel, his heart pounding and dozens of thoughts somersaulting through his mind as he digested what Mina had just told him. It seemed so clear to him now… but at the same time, the mystery that had just been wiped away—a mystery that he had not even been aware of—had been simultaneously replaced by several more. And amidst his turmoil, an image was materializing in his mind's eye: a flash of gold, lines that defined her cheek, her chin… His heart seemed to leap even as it raced.

He gripped his flight controls and he realized to his shock that a fresh, burning feeling of life was pouring back into his body, reinvigorating his tired muscles, reigniting his will, banishing every lingering trance of weariness and doubt. When Hanji broadcast their new attack orders, he felt, once more, the same intensity of nervous apprehension that had fluttered inside him in the hours leading up to the battle that morning.

Suddenly, his urge to survive had never felt stronger.

OOOOO

Mina's fire tore up the squads of advancing Imperial troopers, scything them down to the gray snow as flashing needles of energy exploded among them. As Armin kept the T-47 flying level, just twenty to thirty meters above the surface, he watched with wide eyes as white-clad snowtroopers disintegrated in front of him, limbs flying and lifeless bodies falling and tumbling as the frozen earth around them erupted into boiling steam. Those still living dove to the ice for cover as their neighbors died around them. The most foolish soldiers remained standing, firing back vainly at Armin's windscreen as the snowspeeder screamed towards them. They died where they stood, their body armor erupting in flame as it met the inevitable blaster bolt.

This was their fourth strafing run over the flat ground before the second trench line.

Yet, as Armin pulled their speeder into a climb and looked back over one shoulder to survey the result of their attack, he stared in astonishment. Though one in three, perhaps even one in two of their comrades lay dead or dying, the Imperial soldiers were mechanically rising to their feet, raising their blaster rifles as they resumed the advance. Not one retreated, not one ran, and not one even showed a sign of fear as Hannah and Franz followed in Armin's wake, cutting a fiery swath through the survivors.

With a chill that ran down his spine, Armin realized that even the snowtroopers diving for shelter were doing so not out of the natural instinct for self-preservation, but with the mindless intention of preserving the strength of the attacking force.

Indeed, Armin watched as a last handful of white-clad infantrymen rose in the aftermath of Hannah's attack run, only to fall anew as Mikasa's blaster cannon cut them down.

Perhaps even more than the horror of Aldaraan's destruction, this hive-like, single-minded devotion to the Empire's cause seemed to Armin like the ultimate proof of the evil of the galactic power that he was fighting. It was a robotic, inhuman display of indifference that terrified him to his core.

He pulled at his control yoke, bringing the aircraft around for a fifth pass.

Suddenly, Mina let out a cry of horror. "The shield generator just went down!"

Pulling them up and out of the turn, Armin reached with his left hand for his comm receiver, configuring it again to pick up transmissions from across the entire battle. Clamoring orders and battle reports immediately filled his ears, and he took in the cacophony of shouts overwhelming all Alliance communications.

"Trauma teams! We need trauma teams at the generator base, _now_!"

"All noncombat personnel, assist with evacuating the secondary aid post!"

"Begin retreat! Eighth Battalion, fall back!"

There was no doubt about it. The generator had been destroyed, and the entirety of the base was now open to direct bombardment from space. The battle had now entered the final, chaotic phase of a total rout. He listened on with growing pessimism as unit after unit withdrew or was overrun, as voice after voice reported new Imperial advances. Then… a brief flurry of frantic conversation stood out to Armin among the competing voices in his headset.

"Rogue Three, this is Command. What happened to Rogue Leader, over!?"

"He was hit and went down a minute ago—I lost contact…"

"Wedge, this is Rogue Six! I saw him hit the dirt right in front of the walker formation!" another pilot exclaimed.

Armin felt his eyes widen. Did that mean… did that mean that they had even lost Commander Skywalker? Had the battle managed to claim a Jedi—the hero of Yavin, the destroyer of the Death Star, the rescuer of Princess Leia Organa of Aldaraan?

_Good luck, and may the Force be with you._

Where, then, was the Force?

Tendrils of sorrow reached towards his heart, and he grasped his flight controls as though he were wrapping his fingers around the Emperor's own throat. Not wanting to hear more, Armin returned his comm receiver to the squadron channel. It, too, was abuzz with the news of the shield generator's loss.

"Everyone, stay calm!" Hanji urged them all, talking over Thomas and Franz's panicked chatter.

"Command just sent the evacuation signal," she told them. "Most of our friends on the ground have to walk to the transports, but we don't have to—we can fly straight to the evacuation point. It's our mission to make—"

Her transmission devolved into a mangled yell of surprise, and Armin's heart stopped.

Wildly, he scanned the sky, craning his neck and back as he searched, his breath caught tight in his throat.

He finally saw it. Behind him and to his right, rolling at a dizzying rate, engulfed in fire, Hanji and Levi's T-47 was dropping rapidly towards the earth. Like a discarded toy, it fell in a nearly straight descent to the ground before landing with an impact that sent broken fragments skipping across the snow for hundreds of meters.

Moments later, several laser blasts lit the surface around the crash site, hiding the terrible spectacle from view behind a roiling cloud of vapor. Tracing the beams along their path of travel, Armin found himself staring at the AT-AT that they had thought disabled. Dark and mighty, it towered above the ground without moving, its neck still smoking from the damage that Levi had inflicted. As Armin stared, its head traversed several degrees, then fired another volley of energy just past Mikasa's speeder.

It wasn't fair. Armin felt his vision blur as his eyes welled up with tears. Hanji… Captain Levi… An instant ago, the idea that they might die had subconsciously seemed absurd and unthinkable. Yet, with their deaths, he felt newly aware of the passing of every other fellow pilot and friend that had fallen today.

Reiner, Bertholt, Petra…

Auruo… Connie…

Sasha, Erd, and Gunther…

Mike Zacharius and Commander Erwin…

For the second time in his life, he felt as though everything he knew was being taken away from him. Just as he had back then, Armin felt overwhelmed, unable to even comprehend the magnitude of how his world had changed on this day, much less begin to accept it.

A part of him felt as though he ought to cry out in anger and grief… yet his emotional response felt delayed, as though his mind had not yet realized that Auruo's tasteless posturing, Sasha's inane antics, or Commander Erwin's reassuring presence were forever things of the past now.

If anything, he reflected, losing them felt worse than losing his family had. This time, his friends and comrades had died right in front of him, just before his eyes, yet he had been equally unable to save them…

In that moment, an Imperial walker could have easily lined him up in its sights and swatted him from the sky, and Armin might not have batted an eye. Even as his headset filled with shocked exclamations as his squadron mates reacted to what had happened, Armin sat in his cockpit, motionless, his hands resting on the control yoke in a pantomime of manned flight, but his mind a light-year away.

Commander Erwin Smith had been lost. Lieutenant Commander Hanji Zoë was dead. Captains Levi, Mike Zacharius, Gunther Schultz, and Erd Jinn were dead. The senior flight lieutenants—Petra, Auruo, and Reiner—had all been killed.

Jean's lieutenancy postdated Armin's, while Mikasa's promotion had not yet been formally approved, which meant that of the remaining squadron pilots…

…he, Armin, was now the commander of the 57th Scouting Corps Tactical Air Squadron.

The sky around him, blue and gray, punctuated by columns of dirty smoke, had never felt lonelier.

Faces appeared in his mind. Mina's, Thomas's, Eren's, Marco's… Their lives were now his to command, and it frightened him. Feeling the weight of his new duty resting heavily upon his shoulders, a part of him wanted to reject the mantle of authority. He was no Erwin Smith. He was no Hanji Zoë.

Abruptly, he recalled the promotion ceremony where he'd first received his lieutenant's bars. He'd long forgotten the presiding Mon Calamari Rear Admiral's name, but the fleet officer's words had stayed with him.

_The responsibilities of a leader have now been added to your responsibilities as a pilot. In our galactic struggle, you are no longer just a brave soldier, but an instrument of the Alliance's ideals and will, entrusted to guide it along the path to victory! We charge you to nurture and safeguard those placed under your command, to guide and wield them capably in battle, and to lead them by example in all things…_

Though every bone and muscle in his body yearned to remain still, to let the Imperial fire claim him as well and free him from his overpowering fatigue, Armin mustered the strength to return his mind to the fighting around him.

He surveyed the battlefield with new eyes, scrutinizing each corner of the fighting below with a new kind of attention. He evaluated each segment of the frontline, noting where Alliance troops were in full retreat and where they were holding firm.

The picture he saw through his cockpit's transparisteel canopy was bleak indeed. The defense line smoked and burned, its laser turrets in ruins, all but naked before the oncoming mass of Imperial infantry and walkers.

Everywhere he looked, the tan and gray winter parkas of withdrawing Alliance soldiers covered the snowy slopes. They struggled towards the rear under fire, abandoning their equipment, pausing only to help those who had been hit. Behind them, a wave of white-clad snowtroopers pushed forward, leaping into the cratered trenches to grapple with the defenders hand-to-hand.

Here and there, Armin could see groups of surrounded Alliance infantry fighting on in disorganized knots, trapped hopelessly within the sea of attacking Imperial soldiers. He searched the ground beneath their snowspeeders with urgency, scanning desperately for any vulnerable enemy target, any weak point that he could throw the squadron against and have a real impact…

His heart sank at what he saw. Arrayed against them stood no less than three battalions of elite Imperial forces—a force so vast that Armin doubted the squadron could hurt it meaningfully even if the enemy conducted the most amateurishly inept antiaircraft defense possible.

If the Scouting Corps kept fighting, Armin calculated, they might at best, with luck, destroy a handful of light walkers, perhaps even eliminate one of the AT-ATs… but those paltry losses would be insignificant to a galactic empire that boasted unimaginable wealth and resources.

As he flew over the battling troops, he felt as though he was watching a surging flood from the air, bearing witness to the destruction while powerless to intervene. Continuing to attack would be no less pointless than dropping stones in the path of the deluge.

There was no longer any room for doubt—Line Rose had finally fallen. The ground battle was lost.

"We're falling back." he declared.

"What!?" Mikasa exclaimed, "Armin!"

Eren's reaction was filled with a similar degree of shock. "Armin, Hanji ordered us to hold position here!"

She had. Armin could still see the wreck of her destroyed T-47 from here. It rested less than fifty meters from the nearest trench, and had Armin not witnessed the crash himself, he would have had difficulty distinguishing the smoking ruin from the skeletal remains of the blasted laser batteries around it.

For the most part, the Alliance troops on the ground were already dead. For now, his squadron lived. His obligation was to fight for those still living.

"I know she did," he explained. "But we've already lost Perimeter Rose. Look around you… there's just nothing more we can do to help."

"Those are our comrades down there!" Eren protested. "They'll get massacred if we don't do something!"

To his right, Armin could see Mikasa and Eren's T-47 wavering visibly, slipping slightly further from the rest of the formation as Mikasa readied herself to dive to the aid of their fellow soldiers.

Armin bit his lip before replying. "We can't help them now even if we tried."

He closed his eyes and continued, even though his words felt bitter to the taste. "What the Alliance will need most in the coming weeks are starfighters and starfighter pilots. There are ten of us left—ten trained pilots. Almost enough for a full squadron. We have to get to our X-wings and evacuate with the rest of the transports. That's our responsibility."

For a moment, silence reigned in the wake of Armin's words. Flying at just a hundred meters, they passed over the war-torn frontline. From their altitude, Armin could see every flash of blaster rifle fire, every blazing-white explosion of a thermal detonator as the pockets of Alliance troops fought to the bitter end.

"Understood," Jean finally said. "And Armin—I'm sorry about earlier…"

"It's all right," Armin replied wearily. "Form up on me. We'll head for the eastern hangar entrance and land near our fighters."

Four airspeeders. Four out of the eleven other T-47s that had taken off that morning alongside Armin's still remained, and they assumed their positions in a loose formation in the air around him. Swinging to face the northeast, they turned their backs on the sorrowful scene behind and below them.

Out of the corner of his eye, Armin suddenly perceived a bright flash from the ground below, followed by a rapidly climbing vapor trail. Adrenaline suddenly surged through his veins, and his head snapped to that side to look.

A portable missile fired from the surface!

"Missile launch! Missile launch!" he cried, alerting the others.

Armin followed the rising rocket with his gaze, frantically attempting to predict the identity of its target. As he watched, it turned, closing in at a blinding rate towards one of the snowspeeders flying alongside his…

Armin's world seemed to come to a crashing stop.

"MIKASA! DODGE!" he bellowed.

Shouts from Jean, Mina, and Hannah filled the comm as the other pilots realized what was happening. As one, they ignored the flight controls in their hands, the battle raging around them, and even the threat of other missiles below. They watched instead with trembling hearts as the two airborne objects moved ever closer and closer together in the sky beside them.

Mikasa reacted in the blink of an eye at what seemed like the last possible second, inverting the airspeeder before throwing the aircraft into a screaming dive precisely calculated to draw the projectile chasing them into the ground. Armin inhaled sharply as he watched both prey and predator descend, praying with all his might to the Force and to every and any deity that he had ever heard of that he was not about to witness yet another blood-red explosion, yet another airspeeder falling in flames…

The missile, to his great relief, failed to follow Mikasa through the maneuver and smashed itself impotently against the ice without exploding.

For once, however, Mikasa had miscalculated.

As her T-47 pulled out of the dive, its belly briefly met and scraped the surface of Hoth. Instantly, the snowspeeder rocked from the force of the collision, and Armin saw several metal parts shear away from the aircraft as the entire vehicle bounced against the frozen plain. A plume of displaced ice and snow powder materialized in the T-47's wake as Mikasa wrenched it back towards the air, struggling to recover. A moment later, the twin repulsorlift engines powering the speeder failed, and the vehicle descended once more, plowing into the earth and sliding several dozen meters before coming to a stop.

The force of the impact seemed to twist Armin's own stomach.

He tried to stand in the cockpit, straining against his pilot's harness to lean over to the side for a better view of the crash as he yelled out.

"Eren! Mikasa! Are you OK!?"

To his infinite relief, he heard Mikasa cough before she replied, "I'm fine. Eren?"

"I'm allright!" Eren exclaimed, before commenting unnecessarily, "We've crashed."

Armin moved to circle his snowspeeder above Mikasa's landing site. He saw the canopy of the crashed snowspeeder rise, and at the sight of the two orange-clad pilots moving inside the cockpit, he let out a grateful sigh.

Then, he saw a lance of bright energy fly across the ground and bury itself in the earth next to the crash site, and his pace quickened again.

Mikasa and Eren had landed directly between the Imperial infantry and the withdrawing Alliance forces.

Suddenly, the snow below lit up with flying blaster bolts as the Imperial troops realized what had happened. Below, all he could make out were flares of red ricocheting and sparking off of the crashed speeder's armor. From the disabled vehicle's cockpit came answering flashes as Mikasa and Eren drew their blaster pistols and fired back.

"Mikasa, Eren!" Armin yelled, bringing his speeder into a diving turn. "Fall back to the base now! We'll cover for you!"

"Damn it!" Jean exclaimed upon seeing his maneuver. "Armin, get back here! We can't stick around—I'm reading locks from another half-dozen portable launchers!"

Armin knew he was right. Every rational bone in his body was telling him that he was just endangering himself and Mina, putting them at risk of the same fate as Mikasa and Eren or worse. All the same, he hesitated to return the airspeeder to level flight.

They were his friends. They were from Shiganshina. They were some of the last people alive that he had grown up knowing.

"Armin…" Mina began, her own voice choked as she, too, was torn over the question of staying to help their friends.

"Armin, we're fine here!" Mikasa snarled. "Hurry up and get back to the hangars before more of you get hit!"

He closed his eyes tightly as he pulled out of the dive, climbing back towards the other three aircraft above and ahead of him.

He looked earthwards one last time as they passed over the fallen snowspeeder. Still, sporadic bursts of light were flying outwards across the snow as Mikasa and Eren returned fire, their defiant shooting paling in comparison to the flurry of red darts converging on the T-47 from seemingly all sides, bouncing off its durasteel plating or winking out in the snow around it.

"Popping a smoke grenade!" Eren called out, blaster fire ringing in the background.

"Armin, we'll withdraw with the garrison forces," Mikasa stated. "We probably won't have time to make it to the X-Wings, so we'll catch a ride out on one of the transports and meet up with the rest of you at the rally point."

"Mikasa, don't forget to wipe the computer and destroy the cockpit!" Eren shouted. He addressed Armin next, shouting over the chaos on the ground. "Armin, get out of here! We'll be fine on our own—see you at the rendezvous!"

Their comm went dead with a click as Mikasa shut down the T-47's systems.

There was nothing more that Armin could do. Nothing but trust Mikasa and Eren and believe in their ability to hold off their attackers and escape to meet up with him again. Below, he could already see a squad of Alliance infantry pushing towards the crash site, exchanging fire with the advancing Imperial troops opposite them.

"Let's go!" he cried, forcing the harsh words through clenched teeth.

With his left hand, he reached for the throttle and pushed it wide open.

OOOOO

Whether their airspeeders had been caught by Imperial aircraft, or by missile walkers, or by man-portable launchers firing from the ground below, Armin would never know for sure.

Their four T-47s had been descending slowly, approaching the main base, when the missile lock warning had roared to life again, piercing their ears with its insistent shriek.

"Shit!" Mina cursed. "We're out of chaff and flares! Armin, evade!"

Armin moved to throw them into a rolling spiral, but before the T-47 had begun to turn, the missile had caught up to them.

A powerful blast rocked the aircraft, buffeting it furiously as though it had been caught in a giant's fist. The earpieces built into Armin's headset deflected the worst of the concussive blast, but his eardrums shrieked with pain as the pressure wave from the missile's detonation caught him. He felt transparisteel fragments fly sideways through the cockpit, gashing his cheek and jaw in passing, and the control yoke bucked violently in his hand. Suddenly, what sounded like a dozen alarms began filling his ears, and the acid aroma of smoke met his nostrils.

He opened his eyes. The instrument panel shone before him, several of the displays cracked or nonfunctional. The status symbols he saw screamed yellow and red at him—port engine failure, loss of secondary electrical power, loss of cockpit pressurization, loss of rudder control…

He gasped, "Mina! Are you all right!?"

Mina groaned. "Ugh… caught a piece of shrapnel, but I'm fine…"

He heard her struggle into action despite her wound, punching at buttons and switches. At the same time, Armin became conscious of the wind, whistling and howling through the gaping holes in their shattered cockpit canopy.

He checked his instruments again. They had lost half of their altitude and much of their airspeed, and their engine power was dropping at a worrying rate. He pulled at the control yoke, and realized with a start that it felt sluggish and unresponsive.

"Armin, our hydraulic fluid is leaking," Mina reported. "We might lose flight controls any second… I'm restoring communications—now!"

Armin hadn't even realized that his headset had gone silent. Suddenly, voices appeared in his helmet once more.

"—all engine power! I don't think we can make it there!"

"Green Five, do you copy!?"

Continuing to yank at the control yoke as he tried to bring the speeder's nose up, Armin spoke. "Five here. Mina and I are fine but badly damaged. All pilots report!"

"Six here! We're fine with no damage!" Hannah cried.

Jean's voice was next. "This is Nine. Mild damage, nothing serious. No injuries."

From Thomas's tone, Armin immediately sensed that something was wrong.

"Twelve here! I—we've been hit bad… I've lost power in… in both engines! And Dazz—he's not responding!"

Armin grimaced. In his hands, his control yoke felt as though the bearings had been coated in gluepaste. Even as he watched, another red light appeared on his dashboard, indicating an engine coolant leak.

"We've been hit too," he said with a sigh. "No injuries… but we're losing flight controls."

Armin raised his head to look towards the horizon. The skyline dipped and rose erratically as he wrestled with his controls. Ahead, the white slopes of the hill containing Echo Base loomed in front of them. For some reason, it had never appeared so formidable, so insurmountable to him before this moment.

He sighed a second time as the reality of their situation dawned on him.

"Jean," he declared. "You have command. Head with Hannah to the evacuation point from the air and get to your X-Wings."

Armin looked back towards the southeastern slope of the base and saw what he was looking for—a series of small doors that opened out onto the hillside. "Thomas and I will land here and travel through Echo Base to reach the hangars. Don't wait for us."

Jean's voice was grim but focused. "Roger that, Armin. See you at the rally point."

"Yeah," Armin replied. He loosened his grip on the control yoke, and the T-47 immediately sank, descending towards their new landing side. He glanced to his left and saw Thomas's speeder trailing smoke as it moved to follow him. Returning his attention to the ground below them, he gauged their rate of descent. Given his current degree of flight control, this landing would not be difficult… but he would only have one opportunity.

Abruptly, Jean added, "You'll make it out, right? Don't disappoint me."

Sitting amidst his ruined cockpit, surrounded by warning lights and system alarms, Armin managed a laugh. "Roger that, Nine."

OOOOO

They landed gently on the snow outside one of the base entrances.

Without hydraulic power, Armin hadn't even been able to deploy the T-47's landing struts, and so he had simply allowed the crippled aircraft to pancake to the earth in the last few meters of its descent. They had arrived on the surface with a jarring jolt, and several more banks of status lights had instantly lit up, announcing the failure of another half-dozen systems.

Well, he reflected with dark humor, the Alliance had never planned on evacuating the snowspeeders anyway.

Moving quickly, he and Mina unbuckled their flight restraints. Armin hit the canopy control, raising and opening the ruined cockpit. Immediately, the freezing wind rushed in to meet them, numbing his neck and cheeks almost instantly with its kiss.

He looked around as Mina busied herself with wiping the T-47's computer.

The exterior of the base was eerily quiet, despite the signs of fighting that had scarred the hillside around them. Several bodies, both Alliance and Imperial, lay scattered around the group of entrances, and blaster charring marked the half-open durasteel doors. Discarded equipment littered the snow, and Armin's eyes rested in turn upon a dead tauntaun, an abandoned hoversled, and the blackened remains of a utility droid. Flanking the nearest set of doors stood two small laser turrets—unoccupied by Alliance soldiers, yet strangely left undamaged. He felt a shudder travel down his spine as he realized that he wasn't even sure if this area of the base had been occupied by the enemy.

"All set," Mina announced next to him as she stood up and climbed out of the speeder's cockpit. "I primed the grenade to go off in three minutes."

Armin nodded.

They looked over to where Thomas's snowspeeder had landed, and Armin's eyes suddenly narrowed. He could see that Thomas had opened his cockpit canopy, and the young pilot had left his speeder and was walking around towards its rear half as though in a daze.

Dazz, however, had not moved from his seat.

In a second, both Mina and Armin were racing across the snow as fast as their tired legs could carry them. Thomas looked up at the sound of their footsteps nearing, and they saw that his face was streaked with tears. His devastated expression as he stared back at them revealed a guilt beyond words.

The two of them slowed to a stop just a few paces from the downed aircraft. Mina's mouth opened wordlessly, and she reached up to her head to remove her helmet.

Armin looked over to Thomas, scanning the other pilot's tattered flight suit, the scorch marks scored across the ruined life support unit hanging from his chest. Thomas caught Armin's eye, his lip trembling.

"I…" was all Thomas could say.

He closed his eyes, sending more teardrops rolling down his cheeks, and turned away to face their fallen comrade. Together, they stood silently for a moment next to the charred airspeeder, averting their gaze from the worst of the wounds across Dazz's head and upper body.

Dazz deserved a better eulogy, Armin knew, but in his current state, all he could manage was a callous, impersonal, trite statement.

"He's gone, Thomas. There's nothing we can do."

"May the Force be with him," Mina added silently, to Armin's great gratitude.

A part of Armin began to recalculate the squadron's tally of fatalities, adding Dazz to the list of the dead. Forcefully, Armin shunted that consciousness aside, revolting at the idea of counting all those who had been lost.

They had been friends and fellow pilots, and a number could not possibly do them the justice they deserved.

His eyes stung painfully, and Armin realized that the cold of Hoth's exposed surface was threatening to freeze his tears solid from the moment his eyes had even begun to water.

"We should move," Mina finally said. "That grenade is going to go off any second now."

Thomas wiped his face with a tattered sleeve. "Damn… that's right, I forgot—"

At that moment, a commanding voice that sounded almost mechanical rang out across the open ground.

"Rebels! Halt! Raise your hands above your heads!"

They spun. There, just forty paces downslope, a squad of Imperial infantry was approaching them, their blaster rifles aimed squarely at the three pilots. Except for their cold, black eye lenses, they looked like phantoms, pitiless and ethereal.

At the sight of the enemy so close to them, something inside Armin snapped. He reacted so quickly that he surprised even himself as he darted to Thomas's side, snatching the unused concussion grenade from the youth's equipment belt. A second later, the cylinder was primed, flying through the air in a gentle arc straight towards the group of snowtroopers.

The white-clad troopers scattered, yelling warnings to one another as the grenade sailed towards them. The phantoms drifted across the snow as they moved out of the projectile's path.

Armin was already making his next move. The grenade from his own equipment belt was in his hands and primed for a ten-second fuse, and he lobbed it with an underhand throw into the cockpit of the nearby speeder. The explosive bounced off the back of the pilot's seat with its warning lights flashing before falling out of view.

At that moment, a sharp, percussive blast from downslope announced the detonation of Thomas's grenade.

"Follow me!" Armin roared.

Mina had already drawn her blaster, and she rapidly overtook him as they raced for the nearby doors. Thomas ran close behind them, crying out in surprise as the first blaster bolts flew just over their heads.

Armin ducked as he ran. The wind buffeting them had never felt stronger; his flight boots had never felt heavier. The snow beneath their feet seemed to tug at them, holding them back with an icy grip. He stared up ahead at the open entrance doors, blinking as another blaster rifle bolt flew just feet in front of his face. A part of him imagined what easy targets they were presenting to their attackers, and he braced himself with the full expectation that the next crimson beam would catch him squarely in the back of his head…

A second later, both crashed airspeeders exploded simultaneously, erupting with such coordination that Armin couldn't have planned it any better even if he'd intended to from the start.

Around them, the day seemed to brighten twofold as the T-47s' stores of fuel and blaster actuator gas ignited in a single massive roar. The concussion of the blast almost knocked them over as they ran, pursued by flying debris that fell all around them like rain.

Not a single further blaster bolt flew towards them as they made it through the half-opened doors into the base.

At the threshold, Armin stood aside to let Thomas pass, pausing to look back behind them at the scene outside. There, the snowspeeder that had carried him and Mina for the last few months burned brightly, spitting breaths of orange fire as it died where it lay. To the other side, the other airspeeder had all but vanished amongst the flames—a bright funeral pyre for yet another fallen friend. Bracketed by the two blazing wrecks, the squad of Imperial soldiers was regrouping, charging up the hill after them.

Before he turned away to run deeper inside the base after the others, Armin's eyes flickered for one last instant to the stunning backdrop behind it all, to that sweeping landscape of mountains and ice painted across the horizon from east to west.

Again at peace, the great snow plain slept dreamlessly beneath the late-afternoon sun.

OOOOO

**Another mammoth chapter complete! Whew! (I just know I'm going to notice fourteen embarrassing typos as soon as I post this…)**

**Next chapter: a thrilling foot chase through the corridors of Echo Base! It's all outlined already, and I've written a couple pages in advance, so hopefully it will be ready soon.**

**As you might have noticed, I don't kid around with character deaths, haha. After all, an Attack on Titan story wouldn't be complete without the threat of mortal danger. War is serious business, and as Jean would say, "Seems not everyone gets a dramatic death." Fear not, though, there's still more than enough of the 104th trainee corps left to work with!**

**I bet a few of you might have assumed that I would kill off the usual suspects first—Mina, Hannah, Franz, Thomas, etc… Not so! Besides, I kind of think they deserve more attention and time in the limelight than they often get in fanfics.**

**Yet again, I find myself delighted with how appropriate the Star Wars setting is for exploring our SnK characters. This story has been a pleasure to write so far. I hope you've enjoyed the read, and as always, don't forget to favorite, follow, and review!**


	7. Flaming Water, Frozen Earth: Chapter 7

**Flaming Water, Frozen Earth**

**Chapter Seven**

-DOCUMENT START-

INFORMATION AVAILABLE FOR PUBLIC DISCLOSURE:

DOCUMENT#: AAA43991

ALLIANCE GRAND MEMORIAL LIBRARY, CORUSCANT

**MEDAL CITATION**

AWARDED ON THE GALACTIC STANDARD CALENDAR DATE** 38:12:28**

BY THE RECOMMENDATION OF

**COLONEL RICO L. BRZENSKA**

**44TH INFANTRY DIVISION, ALLIANCE ARMY.**

for gallantry and heroism in combat against ground and mechanized forces of the Galactic Imperial Navy and Army above and upon the surface of the planetoid HOTH in the HOTH SYSTEM between 0900 HOURS and 1600 HOURS on the Galactic Standard Calendar Date 38:6:7.

Tasked with covering the evacuation of ECHO BASE by assisting defending ground forces from the air alongside her combat airspeeder squadron, FLIGHT LIEUTENANT MIKASA ACKERMANN repeatedly exposed her aircraft to withering anti-aircraft blaster cannon and concussion missile fire in her unhesitating pursuit of the mission objective, placing the lives of her fellow soldiers on the surface and in the air above her own safety. Displaying exemplary piloting skill, FLT. LT. ACKERMANN was directly responsible for the destruction of no less than five All-Terrain Scout-Transports, while inflicting heavy casualties upon attacking Imperial infantry units with pinpoint blaster cannon fire.

During high-speed evasive maneuvering with the goal of evading an incoming missile, FLT. LT. ACKERMANN was forced to crash-land her airspeeder upon the open terrain between friendly and enemy ground forces. Despite moderate injuries sustained in the crash, she coolly and methodically followed Alliance counter-intelligence protocols to the letter, supervising the data wipe and destruction of sensitive materials in her aircraft's databanks. Upon the approach of nearby Imperial troops, she assisted her co-pilot, FLIGHT OFFICER EREN JEAGER in repelling the enemy with small-arms fire until preparations had been completed.

When she realized that incoming enemy fire had become too intense for friendly forces to safely extract her and FLT. OFF. JEAGER from the battlefield, FLT. LT. ACKERMANN insisted that Alliance troops cease all efforts to recover them in order to minimize the risk to others. When Alliance soldiers withdrew at her urging, FLT. LT. ACKERMANN was last seen alive while under heavy small-arms fire, engaging several dozen oncoming Imperial snowtroopers with her standard-issue blaster pistol from behind the cover of her wrecked vehicle.

Her indomitable bravery, exemplary fighting spirit, and devotion to her comrades and to the Alliance's cause are in keeping with the highest traditions of the Alliance Starfighter Corps, and it is on the behalf of the entire Alliance to Restore the Republic that we are honored and humbled to present

**FLIGHT LIEUTENANT MIKASA ACKERMANN**

OF THE

**57TH SCOUTING CORPS TACTICAL AIR SQUADRON**

**WITH THE POSTHUMOUS AWARD OF THE**

**KALIDOR CRESCENT, FIRST CLASS**

-END OF DOCUMENT—

OOOOO

He was a young soldier—tall, with a thin, handsome face and brown hair that tumbled messily over his pale forehead. He sat against the wall with his hands resting over one another in his lap. His eyes were closed, but his expression looked stern, his mouth brow set in a slight frown.

It took them a couple seconds to notice the thumbnail-sized shrapnel wound just above the youth's right temple. The attending medic must have mopped away what little blood had flowed before moving on to his next patient.

Armin read the name and rank tag sewn into the fallen infantryman's parka over his right breast.

SPC. CHURCH, F.

Armin bowed his head for a moment in respect. Then, wasting no further time, he reached forward and removed the thermal detonator, heated canteen, smoke grenade, and spare blaster pistol power packs from the young man's equipment belt and bandolier. The soldier's uniform cloth was still damp to the touch from melted snow.

"We should hurry," Armin told the others as he rose to his feet. As though to punctuate his words, the walls around them shuddered lightly as yet another salvo of turbolasers from the orbiting Imperial fleet pummeled the surface above them.

They moved on at a fast walk, their blaster pistols at the ready.

If Armin had thought of the corridors of Echo Base as gloomy and claustrophobic before, then the Imperial attack had changed them for the worse. Droplets of freezing water fell from cracks in the walls and ceilings created by the Imperial bombardment above, while chunks of dislodged ice littered corners and passageways. The entire facility seemed to be running on reserve power, with the interior lit only by intermittent emergency lamps. Equipment and supplies had been scattered across the floors of the hallways, presumably by Alliance personnel searching the once-neatly stacked stores for any materiel and goods worth evacuating.

In addition, the neat clumps of bodies and the dozens of blaster scars across seemingly every wall had answered Armin's question as to which side currently controlled this part of the base. Looking at the knots of fallen Alliance soldiers crowding the corridors interspersed here and there by motionless suits of white snowtrooper armor, it was clear that Imperial troops had already taken this sector and pushed on further ahead. Indeed, their ears could detect occasional furious bursts of faint shouting and blaster fire in the distance ahead, to either side, and even behind them.

"Where do we go now?" Mina wondered aloud, slowing as they arrived at a four-way intersection between two large corridors. Medical supplies littered the floor around them, and the patches of blood freezing upon the floor indicated that this crossroads had been employed as a makeshift aid station just minutes or hours ago.

There was so much evidence of recent fighting all around them, yet since they had entered the base, they hadn't encountered a single living soul. Granted, they had deliberately chosen the narrowest, least-conspicuous passages to shake off the squad of Imperials pursuing them, but…

Armin weighed their options. They could take the most direct path to the starfighter hangers, gambling that they wouldn't run into the Imperial assault forces. Or, they could move deeper into the base, along a path that was more likely to still be under friendly control…

"We should head north," he mused, "into the center of the base… then east to the hangars…"

He nodded at his own reasoning. This way, if the starfighter hangars had already been captured by the Empire, they would still have a slim chance of evacuating via transport with the Alliance forces still holding out in the heart of Echo Base.

He checked the charge of the power pack fitted to his light blaster pistol out of nervousness before remembering that he had already checked it twice since they'd entered the base.

"Shouldn't we try and raise some friendlies on our comlinks?" Thomas asked quietly.

"Jammed." Mina responded, snorting in frustration. "They're probably intercepting any transmissions we try to make too. Electrocomputing Warfare Division needs to get its act together about these kinds of things."

"This way," Armin said, indicating the passage in question. "Follow me. Check your corners."

Armin had never felt more conspicuous in his orange flight suit as they stepped gingerly over the debris strewn around their feet. Clad from his shoulders to his toes in the bright synthetic garment, he imagined the kind of walking target that he would present to an Imperial soldier in a firefight.

He led the other two pilots as they hurried deeper into the base. The light blaster in his gloved hands felt clumsy and unfamiliar as he pointed it towards each corner and doorway they stepped towards.

"Are you doing all right, Thomas?" Mina suddenly asked.

Armin glanced over his shoulder and saw that Thomas was clutching a hand to his face as though in pain, his blaster lowered at his side as he stumbled after them

"I didn't react quickly enough. I didn't even realize there were missiles in the air already…" Thomas murmured, his voice trailing off. His hand moved, and Armin saw the deep lines of sorrow drawn across his forehead and around his eyes.

"It surprised everyone," remarked Mina sympathetically. "There was nothing you could have done."

The words were empty. All three of them knew that. All of them, even the inexperienced Thomas, had heard similar phrases across their time with the Alliance. They'd all welcomed comrades returning from missions; they'd all seen soldiers, pilots, and crewmen bowed in grief, their comrades struggling to comfort them with words that never quite seemed to suffice.

Armin thought of Connie and Sasha, and he felt something inside him harden and curl up defensively as he recalled how they had died. No, he reflected mournfully. The sense of guilt would never completely leave Thomas.

His mind drifted, and Mikasa and Eren's faces materialized before his consciousness. He wondered if they had already made it to a transport. Were they lifting off from Hoth's surface right now, peering back through the viewports as Echo Base burned behind them? Would they make it past the blockading fleet? Maybe one of them had been wounded in the withdrawal, and the other was now standing worriedly beside them in a medical bay somewhere as they left the planet's gravity well… Or maybe…

He wanted to believe that he would see them again, but at the same time, a fatalistic voice deep inside him was reminding him of other possible futures, warning him sternly against that hope.

Just then, Armin's ears picked up peculiar sounds from around the next corner, and he waved the other two to a rapid halt. He rested his back against the wall and raised his blaster, his heart beginning to pound faster and faster.

There was no doubt about it. As he listened, he could hear it—the sounds of footsteps and low voices, of containers being opened and large objects being moved.

He edged up as close as he dared to where the wall ended, already knowing what lay in the adjacent hall. After all, any Alliance soldiers would be moving frantically, rushing towards the evacuation points. His finger resting on the trigger of his blaster pistol, every muscle in his body primed for action, he mustered up his courage and peered around the corner.

Up ahead, the corridor was packed with Imperial uniforms.

Several stretchers lay against one wall, occupied by injured soldiers whose white armor had been pierced and blackened by blaster fire. Three Imperial snowtroopers carrying medical equipment moved back and forth among them, crouching to administer treatment to the wounded. At the other end of the hallway, another two troopers stood guard with their back turned towards Armin, long blaster rifles couched in their arms.

Armin's glance flickered once again to the wounded men stretched out across the ground, and he felt his eyes widen.

Several of the Imperial casualties had removed their helmets, and for the first time, Armin found himself looking his enemy in the face.

They were human. Not clones, or droids, as some whispered or jeered, but men—men with faces, eyes, even emotions.

The only difference between these troopers and Alliance soldiers was that each of the injured men wore their hair extremely close-shaven. Otherwise, their faces were pale and contorted with the same pain, their expressions just as full of the same worry and fear. They nursed their injuries with the same ginger movements, groaning with the same discomfort as they shifted upon their stretchers.

As Armin watched, the hallway shook as the Imperial bombardment rocked the ground once again, and one of the wounded soldiers cracked a joke, drawing several laughs from the medics and from his fellow casualties.

A hand on Armin's shoulder made him jump in surprise, and Armin turned to see Mina looking at him, her expression questioning and uneasy. She nudged him again, her eyes asking without words whether he was planning to attack, or withdraw to find another way around.

Armin looked back at her and thinned in his lips. His hands trembling, he checked the charge on his blaster a fourth time.

Then, he heard the rhythmic, crunching impacts against the ground—a soft, rapid martial tattoo that rang across the floorplates, punctuated by the staccato of fragments of ice as they were crushed underfoot.

Boots behind them.

Armin did not hesitate. He did not think twice as he stepped around the corner, placed one of the Imperial medics in his sights, and pulled the trigger of his blaster pistol.

A scream. A crumpling white-armored doll. Five heads resting against the ground whirled to look at him, staring in fear at him with five pairs of terrified eyes. A faceless helmet swiveled to face him as well, and he aimed and fired two more shots, sending another Imperial medic falling to the floor.

He felt a shadow pass behind him, and suddenly Mina's blaster was barking alongside his, their weapons filling the corridor with a duet of crimson energy.

The third medic fell, caught in the crossfire. He had not even been their target. Mina and Armin directed their fire at the two armed troopers standing furthest down the hall, their blaster bolts punching ugly black scars into the snowtroopers' body armor.

Shouting echoed around him, fading in and out amongst the shriek of blasters. Voices Armin didn't know cried out behind and in front of him, calling out in surprise, yelling in fear and anger.

Three of the wounded men on the ground scrambled to reach for the blaster pistols at their belts. Another lunged out of his stretcher, reaching for the blaster rifle that one of the two sentries had dropped. Armin turned his blaster pistol on them, looking down the sights at five faces disfigured with terror and hatred.

At that instant, it occurred to Armin that the wounded troopers had not even attempted to surrender. Perhaps the Empire had horrified them with stories of barbaric rebel soldiers who tortured prisoners and executed the injured, fighting ruthlessly and without mercy.

He had never dreamed that he would live up to the worst of Imperial propaganda.

With a pang of shame, Armin turned his blaster on the men in the stretchers, cutting them down one after another. The last wounded soldier was on his knees, raising the blaster rifle he had retrieved, when he suddenly collapsed before Armin could whirl to aim at him.

Thomas stepped past Armin, his smoking blaster pistol still trained on the man that had just died.

At that moment, Imperial troops appeared in the hallway behind them, and Armin opened his mouth, bellowing with an inhuman roar.

"Let's go!"

They ran, sprinting as fast as their tired legs could carry them, leaping awkwardly over the ten corpses sprawled across the corridor.

Their gunfire seemed to have ignited an inferno of Imperial activity. Suddenly, shouts echoed from seemingly all around them. Once, an Imperial soldier emerged from a doorway directly ahead, so close that his falling body had knocked Armin in the shoulder as they shot him and dashed past.

In a way, their pell-mell flight was a welcome relief from the earlier quiet and tension. Panting with the effort of running, they could yell out warnings to one another at the top of their lungs without regard for subtlety or stealth. At the same time, Armin was rapidly becoming aware of just how dangerous their situation had just become. It seemed as though hundreds of Imperial soldiers were materializing out of nowhere all around them.

"Left! Cut left now!" Armin cried as a squad of snowtroopers appeared in the passage ahead. They swerved into a side corridor as incoming blaster bolts whipped past them, sparking and flashing as they hit the walls.

"Watch your step!" Mina warned as they darted across a patch of floor slick with a pool of freezing water.

Bolts of deadly energy flew past them again as the troopers followed them into the hallway. Armin and the others pointed their blasters behind them, firing wildly back at the enemy as they sprinted.

Armin's sense of panic grew as they rounded another corner. One wrong turn or poor decision, and the three of them would be finished. Where were the other Alliance soldiers?

Doorways and signs flashed past them. Storeroom. Armory. Barracks. Generator room. Armin had navigated this exact route a hundred times before. However, in the half-darkness, with the corridors cluttered with a mess of debris and abandoned equipment, everything looked unfamiliar at first glance…

They emerged into another long passageway, this one wider and more brightly lit, and Armin's heart leapt as he recognized where they were.

"This way!" he shouted, turning right and leading them headlong down the hallway. He quickened his pace, ducking as he ran through a stream of icy water pouring from a fissure in the ceiling.

A flash—brief and bright yellow-red—illuminated the walls on either side of him. Armin blinked as an instant later, another flash brightened the hallway with reflected light. More blasters echoed behind them, and two crimson beams shot just past his right shoulder, vaporizing ice and metal alike where they landed.

Armin flinched. He ducked again, this time to make himself a smaller target. His flight helmet slipped forward slightly with the motion, and he lifted his head slightly to look down the path ahead of them as he accelerated again, his boots pounding against the floorplates.

Yet another blaster bolt shot past him, striking a light fixture and extinguishing it, and suddenly, fierce terror gripped him as Armin realized something about the passageway they were fleeing down.

This stretch of corridor was longer and straighter, with no exits for a length of twenty yards.

The walls flashed blood red all around him, and suddenly Armin caught a trace of a scent vaguely like burning plastic. Armin saw something falling out of the corner of his eye as a pained scream followed the sound of the last blaster shots. He heard a loud gasp from Mina as something heavy landed upon the ground just a few steps behind him.

Armin spun, almost losing his balance in his haste to turn around, and his heart froze.

"Goddamnit!" Thomas spat, half-cursing, half-groaning as he lay sprawled across the floor ten paces behind them, his face clenched in agony. One leg trailed behind his body, a gaping hole burned into the orange material of his flight suit just behind the knee. Armin could see a thin tongue of smoke curl from the blackened opening as Thomas shifted, trying to pull himself up onto his hands and knees.

"Thomas!" Mina cried. She had run on past Armin, but now she stopped in her tracks and turned, staring in horror at their squadron mate. A look of desperation appeared in her expression as her gaze lifted to look down the hall in the direction in which they'd come, and she opened her mouth to yell something. Just as she was raising her sidearm, a blaster bolt struck her squarely in the face.

Thomas cried out again, this time in disbelief.

Armin's mind seemed to go utterly blank. His eyes widened as he watched Mina drop to the ground where she stood, her body already lifeless as she slumped across the floorplates without a sound.

Behind them, Armin saw white-armored soldiers filling the hallway, advancing towards them steadily, pausing only to contribute to the storm of blaster fire filling the air. Deadly energy sizzled just past his nose, and Armin stumbled backwards, stepping more by accident than by intent into the shelter of the first doorway carved out of the wall behind him.

Thomas was moving, a strangled howl escaping from his lungs as he threw himself forwards across the ground, pulling himself behind a toppled stack of supply boxes lying against the wall. A barrage of blaster bolts followed him, exploding in flame against the containers and sending several tumbling across the ground. One crate opened as it fell, a collection of Alliance infantry uniforms spilling out onto the floor.

Armin edged out of the alcove as far as he dared, watching Thomas struggle to crawl further behind cover as a constant stream of angry red beams flew around him. Armin's gaze drifted to where Mina lay on her back, a terrible wound gaping across the upper half of her head.

Bile rose in his throat as his mind rebelled furiously against what he was seeing, refusing to accept the callousness, the injustice of the sight before him. He felt like screaming in anguish at whatever celestial powers controlled life and death. Who in the wide galaxy deserved to die like that?

Why?

Why couldn't he save anyone? Why couldn't he save even a single fellow pilot?

He remembered the thoughts that had passed through his head when he had learned of the loss of Aldaraan, and once again, he felt a bitter voice inside himself proclaim that there was no such thing as the Force. There could not be. At the very least, there could not be any Force other than the great powers of darkness that the Sith wielded…

Part of him wanted to run, screaming in bloodlust, straight at the enemy with his blaster blazing, to avenge Mina, Connie, Sasha, Bertholt, and all the others or die trying… but yet another part of him just wanted to give in to his despair—to fall, as lifeless as Mina's corpse, to the floor and relinquish all further efforts to resist the cruel fate that he had found himself caught within.

The rational part of his mind, however, whirred as he looked to where Thomas lay, huddled as best as he could behind the shelter of the supply cartons as blaster fire filled the air between him and Armin. Armin gritted his teeth, armed with a fresh, desperate resolve. He peeked out briefly at the Imperial soldiers advancing down the hall and firing from the shoulder as they closed the distance to Thomas's hiding place.

He would throw a smoke grenade down the hallway and fire a sequence of shots to force the snowtroopers behind cover. Then, he would dash over to Thomas, wrap the other flier's arm over his shoulders, and—

Pulling himself into a sitting position with his back braced against the pile of containers, Thomas looked up at Armin and met his eyes. The blond youth shook his head ruefully and grimaced, his eyes gleaming with an odd light.

"What a war…" Armin heard him mutter beneath the deafening peal of blaster rifles.

Then he saw Thomas, wincing in pain, produce a thermal detonator from his equipment belt and arm it. As the spherical device came to life with a shimmering sequence of blinking warning indicators, the wounded pilot simply closed his eyes and lowered his head to his chest.

Death. At that moment, Armin realized that he had watched so many of his friends die on this day that it had ceased even to surprise him. This time, he was watching Thomas dying right in front of him, yet still he was powerless, forced to be nothing more than a witness. His left hand clenched into a gloved fist, and part of him wanted to rush forward anyway, annihilating himself as well in the brilliant explosion that would claim Thomas's life.

This wasn't fair… This just wasn't fair…

Feeling worse than a coward, worse than useless, he backed slowly further into the doorway behind him. Out there in the corridor, Thomas's face and torso slipped out of view behind the corner, leaving only his legs visible to Armin. Then, Armin steeled his heart and turned to dash through the threshold into the darkness of the side passage.

He felt soulless and empty as he plunged deeper and deeper into the dim hallway, listening to the pitch of the blaster fire behind him change as the distance behind him grew, the walls altering the acoustic echo as the Imperials continued shooting.

Behind him, he heard a earthshattering roar that announced the activation of Thomas's thermal detonator.

That was when Armin remembered that he had even forgotten to say goodbye.

A tidal wave of guilt seemed to fall, crashing upon his soul. Armin ran on, alone, hating himself. What kind of a person was he? If he escaped, how could he face Eren, Mikasa, and the other survivors of the squadron and tell them that Mina, Dazz, and Thomas were all dead? Why was he still able to run, to hide, to fight on after half of his closest friends had died today? Why hadn't he fallen to his knees yet to weep at the loss of so many… so many good people?

Why, indeed, was he still alive?

OOOOO

Out of the darkness in front of him loomed two shadows lying across the floor, their outline and weight unmistakably those of dead bodies.

As Armin neared the first of the two limp forms, he noticed a head of black hair and the body's stern, serious features and realized that he recognized this dead man.

It was the Interior Security Brigade special operations soldier, Lieutenant Marlow Sanders. He lay on his back just next to the wall, his eyes closed and his hands folded over the gaping blaster wounds across his chest. From the position of his body and from the thin trail of blood across the floor, it looked as though a comrade had dragged him there to treat him, only to realize that he had already expired.

The other body was a woman with wavy, shoulder-length brown hair, clad in the same all-black infantry uniform. She had fallen face forwards across the ground, a gruesome opening carved out of the side of her head from a blaster shot delivered at close range. A blaster pistol lay just inches from her fingertips. Her eyes, too, were closed, but her expression remained contorted with a look of total desperation.

Armin wondered briefly if she had shot herself with the intent of avoiding Imperial capture, or if her despair at losing her friend had simply overcome her will to fight on.

He ran on.

OOOOO

MAJOR MITABI'S BOYS—THE UNCONQUERABLE 55TH!

LONG LIVE THE ALLIANCE! CORELLIA BOWS TO NO EMPEROR!

ROGUE SQUADRON WILL BE BACK! FREEDOM OR DEATH!

The graffiti appeared every few dozen feet, sprayed or scrawled in messily slanted lines over doorways or across empty sections of wall. Cartoonish mascots, unit insignia, and Alliance crests bracketed the painted text, decorating the edges of the blocks of lettering.

The custom of covering the interior of soon-to-be-abandoned bases with battle slogans and taunts to infuriate arriving Imperial troops dated back decades—so long that few if any could remember when or where the practice had begun.

VICTORY WILL BE OURS!

Armin had to squint to make out the words as he ran past them in the darkness. Due to the moisture clinging to the walls, the red paint had never dried. The color dripped towards the floor in thin trails, as though emblematic of the blood cost of bringing that declaration closer to reality.

Now, the halls no longer shook from the orbital bombardment alone. Muffled explosions shivered through the walls as Imperial and Alliance troops battled from room to room on the floor above him, blasting away one another with explosive charges and thermal detonators.

Armin checked his chronometer. The time was 1640 hours. He had to hurry.

He forced himself to keep running, stumbling down the dark hallway as his breath came in belabored gulps. Fatigue fought viciously to drag him down to the floor, and his gut twisted with a painful stitch from the prolonged jogging, yet he pulled himself along, cursing under his breath at his own physical weakness.

He could not die.

He was an Alliance soldier, a valuable combat pilot. He, Armin Arlert, was the acting commander of the 57th Scouting Corps Tactical Air Squadron.

He was a son of Aldaraan, and the war that had claimed his homeworld was not yet over. He had sworn an oath—an oath that had bound his life in the service of the Alliance, and the Alliance had not yet released him from his duty.

He'd promised Eren and Mikasa that he would see them again… he'd promised Jean too… and Mina—Mina had wanted him to have a certain conversation…

He had never felt so tired. Every muscle in his body ached, begging him to give in to the pain, to collapse to the ground and curl up in a doorway to sleep. The flight suit seemed to resist each step he took. He could smell his own cold sweat, accompanied by the faint scent of dried blood from the shrapnel cuts on his cheek and neck.

Yet he did not stop. A part of his spirit stressed the need for haste, the necessity of escape. Another part of him kept his body moving out of fear alone—a gnawing fear that if he stopped, the day's experiences would catch up with him, forcing him to relive all the terrible horrors that had happened just hours and minutes ago…

Keeping an eye on the compass indicator glowing around the edge of his chronometer display, Armin forced himself forward.

OOOOO

The closer he had moved towards the center of the base, the more he had found himself having to slow down to avoid encountering the enemy. Eventually, his progress had slowed to a crawl as the proximity to danger demanded that he move in short bounds, pausing to listen for movement every few meters. Surrounded by the shouting of Imperial soldiers, shaken by the earth's trembling as turbolaser blasts and grenade detonations rocked the base, he had thrown himself into whichever passageways had looked darkest and most deserted, and whenever the shadows of enemy troopers had crossed his path, he had clung to the nearest wall, the fingers of his right hand wrapped tightly around the grip of his blaster pistol.

Finally, he had diverted to the floor below, hoping to find a shortcut.

The lower maintenance level of the base was cloaked in darkness, its narrow corridors disorganized and cluttered with piping and wiring that protruded from the walls and ceilings. The floorplan seemed organized at random, and Armin kept a careful eye on his compass tool to avoid losing himself inside the maze of equipment rooms and passageways. As he had hoped, however, this deeper section of the base seemed almost completely unmarked by fighting. Apart from the occasional tremor from the floor above, his footsteps and of his own soft breathing were the only sounds that reached his ears down here.

He pushed onward, feeling his heart lifting with growing hope. This floor was empty! He couldn't hear or see a single sign of another living person on this level, Alliance or Imperial.

Armin had ventured down to the machinery level a handful of times before—three or four times on squadron business, and twice to stop Connie from trying to cut the heat supply to the senior pilot officers' quarters. Now, the hum of furnaces and the whisper of water through pipes was absent, the pumps, boilers, and engines behind the closed machine room doors quiet and unmoving. He could already feel the air on his exposed skin cooling, as what little ambient heat remained bled away into the icy walls.

Abruptly, Armin slowed to a stop, staring down a side corridor in sudden shock.

He had walked down this hallway before… but he was certain that there had never been a door at the other end of that side passage. Indeed, a sign placed on the wall near the corner indicated that the corridor terminated in a dead end. Every time he had glanced down that way, he had only seen a blank wall, half-hidden behind a stack of machine parts.

Now, the jumble of parts had been pushed aside, and a thin section of the wall itself had slid half-open, spilling golden light out into the passage.

Armin turned to face down the side corridor before taking a few hesitant steps forward.

A secret door, isolated on an infrequently-traveled lower floor…

A voice inside Armin's mind reminded him that this was not a mission that he had been assigned, and that somebody else, in all likelihood, had already been ordered to deal with whatever was sitting behind that door. At this stage of the battle, chances were that a special team had already come and gone, destroying or removing everything of importance. The Alliance was an experienced guerilla organization, accustomed to relocating on emergency notice… High Command couldn't possibly have overlooked anything dangerous enough to threaten the movement if captured.

Whatever lay hidden inside that facility was undoubtedly of the most critical importance to the Alliance.

He broke into a run down the corridor, his eyes fixated on that distant door. He would be quick. He would just peek inside, verify that everything had been taken care of…

As he reached the opening, Armin realized that another set of open doors lay just inside the entrance. The outer entry was just wide enough to admit him in his bulky flight suit, and he pushed himself through, placing a hand against the cool metal as his other hand held his blaster at the ready. He blinked as he stepped cautiously through the second pair of doors into the light beyond, his vision momentarily fading as his eyes adjusted painfully to the brightness.

His sight returned.

The room was octagonally-shaped, filled with workstations built around circular banks of communications consoles and data terminals. Opposite from the point at which Armin had entered, another set of doors stood, closed and locked. Eight massive memory library modules stood along each wall, each stretching from the floor fully to the ceiling, and in the room's center sat a quantum computer half the size of Armin's T-47 snowspeeder.

Spinning where he stood, Armin took in his surroundings from wall to wall, thoughts racing through his head like snowflakes in a blizzard. This location was too isolated to serve as a secondary command center or communications hub. The room's layout suggested a highly collaborative work environment, rather than the structured hierarchy that would be expected of any sort of Alliance agency or department headquarters. Lastly, of all the possibilities, only one possible application required this much data storage and computing power.

Not a single sign adorned the chamber, but its purpose was as clear as day.

This was Alliance Cryptology and Cryptanalysis. The home base of both Alliance Intelligence's code-breaking operations as well as its efforts to invent and improve new ciphers for the group's own use in communications.

The room looked as though it had not been touched.

His heart beating faster, Armin felt his eyes widen. He looked around the room a second time, looking for evidence that friendly soldiers had worked to deny its secrets to the Empire—electromagnetic data scramblers, perhaps, or even crude demolition charges placed at every console. He saw nothing. Rather, lights still blinked across the terminals, indicating that they were merely idling, ready for use, their priceless data completely intact.

Then, Armin's gaze finally landed upon a detail that he had failed to notice up until that moment.

Standing over one of the terminals was a waiflike girl with blond hair tied back behind her ears in a bun, dressed in an ink-black commando uniform.

Armin froze in astonishment, a sudden, dizzy feeling overpowering him as he gaped at her.

"Annie?"

OOOOO

Annie reacted near-instantaneously at the sound of his voice. Her head snapped to look in his direction as her body straightened faster than lightning, her hand already clawing her blaster pistol clear from her belt holster. She brought the weapon's barrel to bear on him in a single motion, her expression wild with fear and a focused determination.

For a heartbeat, Armin found himself staring straight into Annie's eyes.

Blue.

Blue, like pale sea ice, viewed through a dark slice of arctic ocean.

He did not feel himself fall. Only when the impact with the ground sent a sharp pain through his entire body did he feel a separate, burning agony in his chest and realize that Annie had shot him.

He heard himself cry out as the combined shock hit him. In that moment, he was unsure which hurt more—for right beside the smoldering wound in his chest, an anguish of a different kind had utterly obliterated his heart.

A hundred thorns. A thousand piercing blades filled the empty void the lost organ had left behind, and Armin realized that he had not cried out from the physical pain alone.

His shoulder hit the ground next, and he sensed rather than felt his flight helmet leave his head before rolling soundlessly across the floor.

The pain was incredible. Every nerve in his torso felt as though it was afire, but Armin did not yell out. Rather, his mind focused with horror on his fluttering, fluctuating awareness… on the twisting, wrenching sensation in his breast. He felt as though energy was pouring away from his body out onto the floor of the chamber—a feeling that he dreaded, a feeling that compelled him with every iota of his exhausted strength to resist and fight.

This… this couldn't be the end…

He seemed to feel and sense everything as he lay there. He could smell his own blood and the horrifying scent of his ruined flesh. He could perceive the cool touch of steel floorplates beneath his cheek. Above all other sensations, he felt his soul twisting as though transfixed with invisible arrows. He saw his vision swimming as his eyes filled with tears, and he felt a terrible, helpless expression seize the features of his face as he struggled to look up at the girl standing above him…

His friend… His…

"Annie, why…?"

The words had escaped from his lips without any conscious effort. He blinked, his eyes heavy, and his vision briefly cleared before more budding tears replaced those now rolling down his cheeks.

He felt the wetness on his cheek, and a part of him marveled at the contrast of that feeling with his sensation of the pool of warm blood spreading beneath him.

Summoning up his draining strength, he lifted his head for a moment to look up at Annie.

Before the end, he had wanted to look into her eyes, to search for any difference between the person standing before him and the friend he had known. He could see her thoughts written across her eyes. Her surprise was fading, replaced by pity and regret as she watched him, observing how, even now, he still was pretending that he did not know… that he did not understand… who she really was and why she was doing what she was doing.

Yet, as Armin stared up into her pale face, he could see only the same familiar Annie behind those blue pupils. Even squinting through bleary tears, he could see that, from the beginning, Annie had never worn a mask at all.

But if that was true, how could she bring herself to do something like this? How could she be an Imperial agent?

Behind her, he could see a small data drive plugged into a terminal, its status lights winking as it worked to copy the workstation's data.

With a pained jolt, Armin realized what Annie was doing. She couldn't…

If she copied those ciphers, the Alliance was finished. With all of its communications codes in Imperial possession, the Alliance leadership would not even realize the danger before it was too late…

A part of him simmered with the desire to fight on, exhorting him to crawl… to reach for the blaster that he had dropped. At the same time, another part of him asked himself if he would really be capable of the resolve to shoot Annie down, even if he was able to reach his weapon before she stopped him. That part of his mind was already giving in, yielding to his fatigue and regret, pulling him towards the black void that was tempting him with a soothing promise of oblivion and peace.

Indeed, he just wanted to sleep… to momentarily forget his place in a universe that had done nothing but toy with him and subject him to darkness and grief…

Yet, even as he felt his life fading, Armin fought to cling on.

He could not die here… He could not die here… He just couldn't…

Faces flashed through his mind, staring at his dying body with sadness in their eyes.

Mina… Sasha… Thomas, Marco, and Christa…

Reiner and Eren and Mikasa and Connie…

Some were ghosts, he knew, others might soon join them as ghosts as well. He himself would be one, he realized.

He looked at Eren and Mikasa, trying to apologize. Their reunion at the fleet would never come.

He turned to the others next, begging his friends to help him stop Annie. They did not move. They merely stared back at him as though unable to understand, their gaze tender with pity and regret. Armin beseeched them again, calling out to them to help him. What Annie was doing… it would mean the end of everything that they had fought and died for…

The evacuation from Hoth would become an extermination. Star Destroyers would follow Alliance signal transmissions across open space, hunting down every ship and battle group one after another. The Emperor would win. Resistance to his rule would be shattered, beyond any chance of challenging his power for decades, even centuries… And Aldaraan—Aldaraan would have perished for nothing…

Could fate truly be that cruel?

The sound of something moving nearby surprised him, and the faces of his friends vanished before his eyes as Armin's mind returned to awareness in the physical world.

Below his neck, the burning pain from the wound in his chest was slowly disappearing. It had become harder for Armin to breathe, and he felt a deadly numbness spreading from his fingers and toes up his arms and legs as he tried and failed to lift his head a second time.

"Please… Annie…" he heard himself murmur.

His vision was fading at the edges, and it seemed as though the lights illuminating the room were steadily dimming…

Even as his body died, it seemed as though his mind was lingering, resisting the nightfall beckoning from beyond the horizon of his awareness. Emotions whirled through him, one after another—a kaleidoscope of sentiments.

Sadness, anger, regret, betrayal…

Why did he have the strangest sensation that he was now sitting up? Why did he feel something soft and warm on his face, something harsh and unyielding at his back?

Delusions. A cynical voice inside him laughed aloud in scorn and bitterness. Dying delusions, fueled by the last sputtering of a brain that was flickering out.

Had he always been deluded, in the end, after all?

So the galaxy really was a dark place, then. A dark and hopeless place… that laughed at the sacrifices and dearest wishes of those individuals who sought to change it… that coldly swallowed up their most defiant efforts as though nothing had happened…

A galaxy without a heart, that would, in time, shrug silently at everything that they had fought for…

A galaxy that had already forgotten that he and his friends had ever existed.

OOOOO

Following her well-drilled instincts, Annie's body automatically tried to return her blaster to the holster at her hip. Her mind, however, refused, ignoring her muscle memory's request, and the blaster pistol fell from her trembling hands. The weapon clattered to the floor with a metallic rattle that echoed around the room. She shuddered at the sound, letting out a short, disbelieving gasp as she staggered a step backwards, her eyes still staring down at the result of her handiwork.

She wanted to look away, yet she could not tear her eyes from the ghastly wound she had burned through the front of his flight suit, or from his graying face turned towards her with an expression of deepest hurt and disbelief.

Every portion of her emergency medical knowledge, from both her Imperial training and her Alliance experience, was confirming what she already knew—that Armin Arlert was dying before her eyes.

Why, of all people, had it been him?

A pool of blood was growing beneath his body, spreading across the metal floorplates. With a lancelike stab through her heart that almost made her cry out aloud, Annie realized that Armin was crying silently, the tears on his cheeks glinting dimly with reflected light.

What kind of a monster was she?

Killing her teammates Marlowe and Hitch had been awful enough. Marlowe had died before he could even react, but Hitch's howl of rage as she had grabbed, far too slowly and far too late, for the blaster at her hip continued to haunt Annie.

As the expression on Armin's face seared itself into her mind, Annie knew that this, too, would fill her nightmares for as long as she lived.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her blaster pistol lying abandoned on the floor. She had always known, after all, that she would have to kill Marlowe and Hitch one day… But Armin—he had merely been in the wrong place…

Of all the coincidences…

Annie felt as though a profound chill had passed through her flesh straight to the bone. Why had he been down here? By all rights, he should have evacuated in his starfighter with the rest of the transports long ago… What in the galaxy had brought him to this forsaken lower level, to this single room among all the hangars and corridors of Echo Base?

Yet, despite all of the questions filling Annie's head, she knew that she could only blame so much on fate and circumstance. This… this had not been an accident.

When she had looked up to see Armin standing at the entrance to the cryptology room, his blaster in hand, she had drawn her weapon and fired at him without hesitation. In that moment, knowing who he was and looking him directly in the eye, she had pulled the trigger with the full, malicious, merciless intent of killing him.

"Annie, why…?"

His voice was soft, barely audible as he struggled to lift his head. His flight helmet had fallen away, and his hair shifted, dropping over his eyes as he fought to raise his cheek from the floor.

Every cell in her body, hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands, was going numb with the wave of horror sweeping over her. She stood there, frozen, unable to avert her gaze or back away. Lashing out desperately, voices in her mind urged her to turn her back on him, to flee the room, or even to pick up her blaster and put an end his suffering.

In that instant before she'd fired that blaster bolt, her resolve had been ironclad in its determination. In the very next instant, as Armin had collapsed to the ground with a pained cry, her soul had been possessed by an overwhelming remorse so powerful that it had come close to sending her to her knees.

She could feel the threat of oncoming tears as her eyes began to sting.

She had never had any rational alternative, she knew… Once they had come face to face, her only option had been to shoot him. In fact, even if he had never met her down here, he would have died anyway because of her, killed fighting as the Empire tracked the fleeing fleet down in the months to come. Why, then, had Annie never regretted anything so badly in her entire life?

"Please… Annie…"

She could tell that his eyes could no longer focus on her clearly, yet all the same he continued staring desperately in her direction, his gaze piercing cleanly through her. She could see his body stiffening, his breathing slowing, the muscles in his face quivering as he held on to what life remained to him.

She could read his thoughts as though they were her own. Behind those eyes, he was fighting, protesting against the ending that fate had handed him. She felt his sorrow over what she was doing, his bitterness at how his life was ending, his helpless shame at having to die slowly in front of someone he—

Annie let out an anguished gasp.

Tears, scalding hot in spite of the prickling coolness of her cheeks, raced in searing lines down her face. Her heart felt as though it had just burst within her, scattering scraps of ligaments and cardiac muscle across the insides of her chest. She was trembling, caught in the grips of a swelling wave of sorrow that made her want to scream and fall, limbs flailing, to the ground.

Instead, she dimly realized that she was staggering forward step by step towards the figure lying there in a pool of his own blood. Blood that she had spilled, forgetting how he had walked beside her through the winding corridors above, how his eyes had widened at her taunting jabs, how his pupils had lit up when he had spoken of the rebellion and the hopes it represented…

No.

She was kneeling at his side, his warm blood seeping into her black uniform pants at the knees. She was wrapping her arms around his body, pulling him shakily into a sitting position, placing his back against the frame of the nearest work console.

Peering through eyes hopelessly swelling with tears, Annie noticed that Armin's own eyes had closed, and that she could no longer perceive the rise and fall of his chest from his breathing.

For him… to die like this…

She, of all people, could well imagine the nightmare of what it would be like to die alone. It was too cruel… It wasn't right…

She leaned over him and kissed him on the lips.

In that moment, she felt the life leave his body.

Annie fell backwards and yielded to the intense urge to sob. She squeezed her eyes shut as she began crying in earnest, hoping desperately from every corner of her soul that Armin had lingered long enough to sense her touch and know that she had been there at the very end…

She could feel his blood soaking her uniform, but she did not care. Annie buried her head in her arms, and a fleeting heat briefly tingled across the skin of her forearm as her sleeve absorbed the tears on her face.

She wept.

In her mind, she could hear her father's voice scolding her for sitting there, unmoving and helpless. Armin was dead. What she had done was done. From the very beginning, this had all been planned, and so what was the use of crying, when the blood on her hands had been there from the day she'd joined the Alliance? There was nothing for her to do now but return home, having faithfully completed her terrible duty.

She looked at Armin again, her eyes resting on his still face, his brow furrowed ever so slightly in pain.

He had known, hadn't he? Annie wondered desperately. Surely he had known that she hadn't wanted this… He had to have understood, hadn't he? Hadn't he been able to imagine how she had felt all along, how her tormenting dread had grown and grown as this day had slowly neared?

Had he even spared a thought for her in his last moments? After all, he had died, alone, believing that everything and everyone that he had fought for had been taken away from him… Annie would not fault him if it had never occurred to him to think of her…

Only one fact comforted her, and that was her certain knowledge that he had not hated her.

Suddenly, Annie's ears noticed the clash of armored boots against metal.

Annie clambered to her feet and wiped her eyes just in time as a sextet of white-clad snowtroopers rushed in through the open doors, sweeping their blaster rifles from side-to-side as they stepped mechanically into the room. Their scorched and pitted armor suggested that they had fought their way through heavy resistance along their way, yet their movements were crisp and efficient, showing no trace of fatigue or injury. A brief flash of anger rose inside her at the sight of her fellow servants of the Empire.

The soldiers sighted her immediately and a heartbeat later, six weapon barrels were aimed squarely at her chest.

"Don't move!" bellowed the second trooper who had entered the room. Colored pauldrons mounted over his chest armor indicated his status as an officer.

"Alpha-Six-Two-Mu-Delta," intoned the snowtrooper with the major's shoulder plates, his finger poised on the trigger of his blaster rifle, ready to cut her down at an instant's notice.

At the sound of the code signal that had been drilled so irrevocably into her head spoken aloud at last, Annie swayed, feeling once again as though she were about to collapse at any moment.

"Zeta-Epsilon-Four-Zero-Phi," Annie murmured in response, choking the words out.

The syllables caught in her throat as involuntary sobs continued to grip her lungs. As she finished the codephrase, a murderous feeling of hatred seized her, and her eyes burned yet again. She closed them, her thoughts consumed with disgust at the backhandedness of her treachery, at the blackness of her father's agenda, and at her own contemptible weakness for having gone meekly along with it all…

When she opened her eyes again, the six snowtroopers had lowered their blasters.

The snowtrooper major nodded. "Good work, Agent Sierra-Four. We followed your signal here as soon as we could. Is everything complete?"

As he spoke, his head turned to inspect Armin's body. His body language as uncaring and emotionless as the mask of the helmet he war, the officer returned his gaze to Annie, satisfied that the dead rebel pilot was no longer a threat.

Annie, too, looked back down at where Armin sat, his head leaning back against the workstation as though he were napping. She could see the trace of wetness glistening on his cheek where their faces had touched, and she did not know if the tears had come from his eyes or her own. Yes, she thought bitterly, a fresh tear escaping from the inner corner of one of her eyes. She supposed everything was complete.

"We brought a communications booster with us. Synchronize the code database with our booster, and we can upload everything to the fleet," one of the other soldiers directed, totally oblivious to her condition as he placed a black suitcase-like device upon the ground and began setting it up.

At the sight of her tears, the stormtrooper major paused for a moment where he stood. Slinging his weapon across his back, he removed his helmet, revealing a face with handsome features and a black, trimmed goatee that his ranking status as an elite officer permitted him. Despite the man's aristocratic look, his eyes were tinged with true sympathy as he spoke.

"Ma'am, are you all right? This must have been difficult for you, I'm sure."

He sighed, looking back down at the fallen pilot at Annie's feet, and this time his expression carried a note of understanding.

"I've extracted Intelligence agents from deep cover operations before…" he continued, nodding sadly. "It's natural that you make friends with those you've lived with for so long. If there's anything I—"

Her father had drilled the motion into her since she'd been old enough to handle a blaster. He had watched over Annie's shoulder as she'd repeated the movements he'd taught her over and over and over again, aiming and blasting away at the holograms of sinister-looking Rebels darting around the target range. Every day at the end of training, she had repeated the action in front of him ten, sometimes twenty times before he would allow her to leave the academy's instructional facility.

She jerked her left hand, sending the snub-nosed blaster holstered at her wrist into her left palm. It took only an instant. She had it grasped in a high two-handed grip, her finger settling on the cool metal of the trigger as she aimed squarely at her target.

Her father had ordered the pistol custom-built for her. Compact and light, its power pack only sufficed for eight shots, but each possessed the energy to punch through a solid inch of durasteel. At the time, its volume and recoil had frightened her, making her flinch badly with each pull of the trigger on the practice range. _Only the best in the Empire for my Annie_, Director Leonhart had declared proudly.

Her first shot struck the Imperial major in the face. Even with her body numb and shivering, even with her eyes filled with tears, she swung the blaster unerringly from target to target, blasting two more snowtroopers cleanly through the chest before the stormtrooper major had even begun to fall.

They reacted as though in slow motion. The next soldier had barely started to raise his blaster rifle when her shot caught him in the neck. Her pistol was already moving on, placing a blaster bolt in the gut of the stormtrooper who had been kneeling as he worked with the comm booster.

The last snowtrooper was diving for cover, hurling himself behind a console in the center of the room, and Annie emptied her blaster, firing a three-shot sequence of blaster bolts that caught the soldier in the chestplate. He hit the ground just short of the workstation and rolled onto his back, limp as a doll.

Annie's ears throbbed from the force of her blaster's roar. Her head felt light, and her vision was swimming before her eyes. Years of training, however, kept her alert and moving, and she was already tossing the spent sidearm aside, reaching for the blaster rifle hanging by its strap from her right shoulder as she heard footsteps in the hall outside. She was still sobbing, even as she swung the weapon from her back, catching it in her hands.

She had the heavy rifle raised just in time to greet the first snowtrooper entering through the door. She pulled the trigger twice, and the room filled with crimson light as the Imperial soldier fell, nearly blown apart at the waist.

Alarmed voices drifted in through the open door, and she turned the rifle without hesitation on the opposite wall. Her ears rang painfully as she sent a barrage of blaster bolts piercing straight through the wall at waist level, each shot placed one person-width apart from the next. Screams of agony from the other side of the doorway told her that her fire had found multiple targets.

"Long gun! Get back!" a robotic voice called out from the outside hall. "Find cover!"

Annie stumbled over to the data terminal beside her. Blinded by her tears, she entered the coded keystrokes by touch and memory, opening her access to the cipher key data. She worked furiously, racing through screen after screen of commands, her ears still listening intently for movement from the hallway outside.

All of her life, she had lived under the tenet her father had taught her—the tenet that no other individual being in the galaxy mattered, that cruelty and injustice were natural and commonplace, and that those who believed otherwise condemned themselves to die, disillusioned and disappointed.

Code names flashed before her eyes. Decrypted Imperial ciphers. Alliance ciphers. Prototype encryption keys. Intercepted code samples. Zettabytes and zettabytes of filed cryptanalysis calculations.

Far too late, Annie had realized that she had met individuals that had mattered, to her.

She did not care if her father was right. What mattered to her was that she had killed two close friends who had trusted her to help them complete their mission, and that a young, brave, hopeful pilot had died with his dreams shattered, still wanting to believe in the possibility of changing the galaxy.

She could still change that.

She entered a final set of clearance codes, and watched through eyes blurred with brimming tears as a confirmation message appeared on the holo-display:

TASK COMPLETE.

ALL DATABANKS ERASED.

Shouldering her blaster rifle, she took aim at the data drive she'd plugged into the terminal and destroyed it with a single shot.

If only Armin could see what she had done… if only he could have known that he had not died defeated…

At that moment, the lock securing the set of closed doors behind Annie clicked open.

She whirled, firing a two-bolt burst that caught the snowtrooper trying to enter squarely in the groin and collar. The lifeless soldier collapsed forward, sprawling across the metal-plated floor with a resounding crash as Annie adjusted her aim, firing three shots through the wall on either side of the now-open doors. A second later, another dead Imperial fell across the doorway, pierced by the beams she had sent through the doorframe.

As the soldier hit the ground, Annie thought back to that afternoon in Echo Base's main hanger, when she'd looked up after toppling an adult male Wookie warrior only to see Armin's dumbfounded, awestruck face staring at her with an expression of shock that had almost made her chuckle.

How had he not been intimidated? What had he seen in her that had led him to follow her, to engage her in conversation, to grin uneasily at her barbs and her terseness?

She reflected that, perhaps, with his faith in justice and his ability to hope, he really had understood her better than either of them had realized.

Transferring the blaster rifle to her left hand, Annie unclipped a squat cylinder from her ammunition bandolier. Squeezing the device's safety lever closed, she pressed its activation button with her thumb before hurling it through the door in front of her. She heard a loud clatter as it bounced off of something solid out of her sight.

The flechette charge exploded a handful of heartbeats later with a sound somewhere between a pop and a hiss. Ducking as she brought her rifle up again, Annie heard the air whistle above her as dozens of durasteel darts flashed past overhead. The detonation was followed by howls of pain from the other side of the doorway, and Annie sensed that the grenade had been effective.

She turned, just in time.

Another stormtrooper was leaning around the first doorway, the black eyelenses of his helmet staring at her pitilessly as the soldier attempted to bring his blaster rifle to bear. She put a blaster bolt through his chest, following it with a second bolt that blew an ugly hole through the trooper's faceplate. He fell across the threshold, his rifle firing a single errant shot as his finger squeezed the trigger reflexively in death.

For a moment, all was silent as Annie kept her blaster rifle trained on the doorway, its sights placed precisely upon the center of the opening. Then, a strange flash of movement caught her eye as something small and white flew towards her through the door, bouncing once across the ground before rolling to a stop several meters away.

Annie narrowed her eyes as she recognized the device.

A standard stormtrooper-issue thermal detonator. Powerful, with a fearsome blast radius in the tens of meters. Each Imperial trooper carried one attached to his belt behind his back, activating it via keypad using a personalized code unique to each soldier. The fuse length could be configured for anywhere to three to thirty seconds.

The default delay was set at ten seconds.

Annie felt her heart begin to race. If the thrower had been too panicked to change that setting, and if she could get to it first, she might be able to toss it back through the door in time, incinerating the whole squad of snowtroopers waiting outside.

She dropped her blaster rifle. She dashed across the floor, her arm reaching out for the deadly white cylinder. Her fingers closed around the device, and her head spun to look at the doorway as she raised it, aiming a throw that would send the explosive into the hallway outside…

The thermal detonator exploded.

OOOOO


	8. Flaming Water, Frozen Earth: Chapter 8

**-DOCUMENT SEARCH COMPLETE—**

INFORMATION AVAILABLE FOR PUBLIC DISCLOSURE:

DOCUMENTS#: TOD57374, AXC38902, LSV34099, LSV88971

ALLIANCE GRAND MEMORIAL LIBRARY, CORUSCANT

**-DOCUMENT ONE START-**

**A COVER LETTER by First Sergeant DAARMO LOWE (501st Stormtrooper Legion, Gamma Company, Fifth Battalion), addressed to the parents of Flight Lieutenant CONNIE SPRINGER on RAGAKO, sent shortly following the BATTLE OF HOTH.**

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Springer,

Please find enclosed an electronic copy of a letter found upon the body of your son, Flight Officer Connie Springer, at the time of his death upon the planet Hoth.

I commanded the stormtrooper platoon that happened upon the wreck of his combat aircraft and oversaw the recovery and respectful burial of his remains. In doing so, my unit discovered and decoded the attached personal message, which was found stored on his datapad.

Though I was your son's enemy, I have seen enough of this conflict to grieve deeply for the loss of life I have witnessed to date. Our current war is one fought with harsh methods and with too little room for compassion. As an Imperial soldier, I have no doubt that I would have disagreed strongly with Connie Springer over the necessity of the fighting currently raging across the galaxy, had I met him in person. Despite this, I can understand and admire the noble motivations which led him to choose the path he took. I did not know your son, but I can believe beyond a doubt that his bravery, idealism, and determination were marks of the tender care with which you raised him.

Please accept my sincerest condolences. I hope you will join me in praying that an end to this sorrowful struggle will soon be in sight.

Respectfully yours,

Daarmo Lowe, First Sergeant

Imperial Army

**-BREAK-**

Dear Mother and Father,

If you're reading this, then I'm sure you now know that I am dead.

I hoped more than anything that this letter wouldn't have to be sent. I meant the promise I made to both of you about coming home, and home was something that I thought about every day. I'm sorry I couldn't keep my promise, and I want you to know that even though I did everything to try and come back alive, I'm not upset that my luck ran out. I don't regret anything. I've been very happy ever since I arrived here; I've made close friends, and I couldn't have been prouder of what I was able to do for the Alliance.

We've made an agreement with each other that as long as one of us survives, they'll visit the families of those of us that didn't make it. Hopefully this means you'll be able to meet many of my friends very soon, and that they'll be able to tell you about everything we went through together.

Don't worry about me—I'm all right. I'm not sure who is going to win this war in the end, but I have faith in my comrades, and I'm sure that, one day, the galaxy will be free again. I don't want you to be angry or sad about what happened to me. Just know that I would be happy as long as I know that the two of you can find the courage to smile a bit once I'm gone.

I love you both so much. I couldn't be more grateful for having such wonderful parents, and I hope you can both live wonderful, long, happy lives.

Your son,

Connie

**-END OF DOCUMENT—**

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**-DOCUMENT TWO START-**

**EXCERPT [p1309-1310] **from_**THE BATTLE OF HOTH**_

by** DR. MARCO BOTT **[Cmdr. (ret), New Republic Starfighter Corps],

Professor of** HISTORY **[Coruscant Central University, Dept. of Galactic Military History].

…nothing short of a minor miracle. Indeed, according to Alliance communications logs, all contact with the designated data deletion team was lost around 1620 hours. At that point, Alliance commanders assumed the worst, and, for twenty-three terrible minutes, it seemed that all hope had been lost, and that the location of the fleet's designated rendezvous point had been compromised. Without a way to warn the fleet in time, the Alliance's struggle seemed all but doomed.

But then, in a series of events that it is possible we shall never fully understand, the automated signal confirming the code database's deletion and destruction was sent at 1643 hours local time.

Further research and inquiry has failed to uncover any specific details of how the Security Brigade's deletion team broke its way into the cryptology facility before holding out long enough to ensure that they completed their mission. Imperial battle reports describe in vague terms a fierce firefight that erupted in that sector of the base corridors, with casualty figures listing as many as a dozen stormtroopers injured or killed by the three-man team. The impact of this determined action, however, is beyond question. Without a doubt, this small, elite squad of three soldiers single-handedly saved the Alliance from total and complete defeat.

In light of these new discoveries, several monuments to Echo Base's Interior Security Brigade have been built in recent years across the galaxy. The first, a plaque with the names of the Brigade's eighty members, was placed in the post-Yavin section of the Alliance Grand Memorial Library on the twentieth anniversary of the battle. The second, a black marble cenotaph, was recently erected in a park near the central commercial plaza in Coronet City on the planet Corellia.

In addition, most of those who fell at Hoth are remembered in spirit at the Monument to the Unclaimed Soldiers on Coruscant, established on the tenth anniversary of the founding of the New Republic. In her memorial address, Mon Montha, whose own son ranked among the fallen that day on Hoth, solemnly related that due to the decentralized, guerilla nature of the Alliance's war against the Galactic Empire, the names of those who fell resisting tyranny were recorded for only 68 percent of all Alliance combatants, while proper burial was ensured for only less than three percent of the fallen. The Monument would be, in effect, a tomb for both the unknown dead and for those without a known final resting place. Since its construction, millions of visitors from across the galaxy have visited the site to pay respects to fallen friends and relatives, leaving the monument surrounded in a sea of flowers and gifts that, if anything, only add to its solemn impact.

Among those so memorialized are twenty of this author's former comrades and squadron mates, eighteen of whom fell during the battle for Hoth, and a further two who perished in the years of fighting that followed. Peace be upon their memories…

**-END OF DOCUMENT—**

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**-DOCUMENT THREE START-**

**ALLIANCE OFFICIAL RECORDS**

WILL AND TESTAMENT OF:

**FLT. LT. ARMIN ARLERT, **57TH SCOUTING CORPS TAC. AIR SQN. (b. 27:11:3)

TO BE EXECUTED FOLLOWING** AN OFFICIAL NOTIFICATION OF DEATH, **OR IN THE EVENT OF A DECLARATION OF** MISSING IN ACTION **FOR A DURATION EXCEEDING** FIVE (5) STANDARD YEARS.**

In the event of my death, please transfer the entirety of my financial assets, personal belongings, and other possessions to **EREN JEAGAR (ALDARAAN (former), b. 27:3:30, CID# 789421180)** and **MIKASA ACKERMANN (ALDARAAN (former), b. 27:2:10, CID# 789189090).** In the event that neither of these two individuals are still living, please donate said funds and personal effects to the **ALDARAANIAN ORPHANS' FOUNDATION**.

A small amount, totaling no more than **2,000 STANDARD CREDITS**, is to be used to cover the expenses of a memorial capsule bearing my family name, containing the enclosed set of holographic images, to be delivered to the Aldaraanian asteroid field in a traditional Return Ceremony.

***SIGNATURE***

**LEGAL NOTE: **

As of the Galactic Standard Calendar Date (GRS) of **55:3:13** [20:3:13 ABY], the conditions of this will and testament have been fully implemented according to the last wishes of the individual specified herein.

Due to the interval of time between the testator's declaration of death and the _de-facto_ legal ascension of the New Republic allowing for this document's execution, the testator's total assets had accumulated to a value of **35,667,800** **STANDARD CREDITS** due to return on financial investments.

In light of these outstanding circumstances, which the testator could not have forseen during his lifetime, the New Republic Board of Executors and Administrators has determined upon review to deposit these funds in trust under the administration of noted philanthropists Hannah and Franz Müller **(CARIDA, b. 28:7:16 and 26:9:9, CID#s 556181990 and 556123401)**, for the purpose of the future development and upkeep of the Orphans' Foundation.

***SIGNATURE***

***SIGNATURE***

***SIGNATURE***

**WITNESSES:** ***SIGNATURE* *SIGNATURE* *SIGNATURE***

**-END OF DOCUMENT—**

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**-DOCUMENT FOUR START-**

**INSCRIPTION:**

**MONUMENT TO THE UNCLAIMED SOLDIERS**

**CORUSCANT, GALAXY PARK**

**IN MEMORIAM**

**AMONG THE STARS,**

**THEY FELL IN THE NAME OF FREEDOM,**

**THOUGH WE KNOW NOT WHERE.**

**THEY LIE, LOVED AND REMEMBERED,**

**BESIDE FRIENDS AND COMRADES.**

**MAY THEY REST FOREVER IN PEACE**

**-END OF DOCUMENT—**

**-END OF SEARCH RESULTS—**

OOOOO

**-THE END-**

OOOOO

**This chapter completes Armin and Annie's story arcs. **

**Chances were, this kind of ending wasn't exactly what you were expecting… That said, this was always the way this fic was always going to end. Even from the very start, I had this story outlined as an eight-chapter work, with the final chapter already completely planned out and partially written from the beginning. I'm sorry if I disappointed anyone who was expecting a thirty-chapter or fifty-chapter work, but I never really intended to go that far with this particular storyline!**

**The inspiration for this story and for the Star Wars setting actually came from a transcontinental flight I made that crossed over Greenland. Looking out of the airliner's window, I thought the landscape below offered a striking resemblance to what I'd always imagined the planet Hoth to look like. Without anything else to do on the long flight, I turned my mind to Star Wars and came up with this concept for a story. Throughout the process of writing Flaming Water, Frozen Earth, I've really come to appreciate just how appropriate the Star Wars setting is for our Shingeki no Kyojin characters. At the same time, the lethality we've grown to expect from Attack on Titan aided me in trying to portray the defeat at Hoth, which was canonically near-catastrophic, in its full glory and horror.**

**Again, as Jean would say: "Not everyone gets a dramatic death, it seems."**

**I've enjoyed blending Attack on Titan and Star Wars, and I am toying with the idea of continuing this narrative from some of our surviving pilots' POVs. I have a few ideas regarding where to go from here, but given that my setting and cast of characters will have completely changed, it is likely that it would appear as a completely new and separate fic if I ever get around to writing it. I'll stop short of making any promises, though.**

**As always, thanks so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed Flaming Water, Frozen Earth, and don't forget to review and favorite!**


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